AEO glossary

Plain-language definitions for answer engine optimization, citation tracking, and visibility in AI answers.

AEO

AEO, answer engine optimization, is the discipline of structuring content, brand signals, and authority so AI answer engines cite a brand inside their generated responses.
Agent analytics

Agent analytics is Profound's product for tracking how AI crawlers and answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and others) fetch a site, interpret its content, and convert that activity into real referral traffic.
AI Brand Vault

AI Brand Vault is Bluefish's metadata and governance layer that controls how AI models describe a brand, keeping the model-facing description on-brand, consistent, and legally cleared.
Answer engine

An answer engine is an AI system that synthesises a direct answer to a user query, typically grounded by retrieved sources, instead of returning a ranked list of links.
Autonomous AEO

Autonomous AEO describes platforms where an AI agent, not a human analyst, decides which prompts to target, drafts the briefs, and routes execution work into production with minimal human steering.
Citation

A citation is an explicit, linked reference inside an AI-generated answer pointing to a specific source URL, distinct from an unlinked brand mention.
Citation tracking

Citation tracking is the continuous measurement of where and how often AI answer engines cite a brand or domain inside their generated responses.
FAQ schema

FAQ schema (FAQPage in Schema.org) is the structured-data type that marks up question-and-answer pairs so AI engines and crawlers can parse them as discrete Q&A units rather than generic prose.
Model coverage

Model coverage is the count of AI engines an AEO tool monitors, at minimum ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews; ideally also Claude, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek.
Prompt-level monitoring

Prompt-level monitoring tracks AI answer engine behaviour at the granularity of individual prompts, what the model said for *this exact question*, rather than aggregated category-level metrics.
Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis classifies how positively, neutrally, or negatively a brand is described inside an AI-generated answer or other piece of text.