AI visibility terms, defined plainly.
Short, textbook-neutral definitions, with a note on why each term specifically matters for a hotel.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO is the practice of optimizing a website's content and technical signals so that generative AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) are more likely to cite or recommend it in a generated answer. It's an evolving, not-yet-standardized term; the industry's definitions of GEO and AEO overlap heavily and aren't drawn with a clean, universally agreed boundary.
Read definition →AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
AEO refers to optimizing content so it can be extracted and presented as a direct answer. The term was originally used for featured snippets and voice-assistant answers, and is now used almost interchangeably with GEO for generative AI answer engines. Where the industry does distinguish them, AEO is sometimes framed as the broader practice of answer-format optimization, while GEO specifically targets generative AI systems, though this boundary isn't consistently applied.
Read definition →AI Visibility
AI visibility describes whether, and how favorably, a specific brand or business is mentioned when a real person asks an AI assistant a relevant question. Unlike traditional search visibility (measured by ranking position in a list of results), AI visibility is measured by whether an entity is named at all inside a short, synthesized answer.
Read definition →NAP (Name, Address, Phone)
NAP refers to a business's core identity details (name, address, and phone number) and whether they're stated identically across every place they appear online: the business's own website, Google Business Profile, third-party directories, and review sites.
Read definition →llms.txt
llms.txt is an emerging, not-yet-standardized convention: a plain-text file, similar in spirit to robots.txt, that summarizes a website for AI agents in a format intended to be easy for a language model to parse. Because it isn't a formal web standard, its absence isn't currently treated as a real problem by most audits: it's a forward-looking, low-effort step rather than a requirement.
Read definition →AI Hallucination
An AI hallucination is when a generative AI system states something as fact that is not actually true, as opposed to expressing an opinion, reflecting a genuine (even negative) review, or declining to answer. Hallucinations are typically caused by a model filling a gap in its available information with a plausible-sounding but incorrect detail.
Read definition →Citation Authority
Citation authority describes how much weight an AI engine or search system places on a given third-party source when using it to corroborate facts about a business. Sources an AI system cites frequently and consistently across many queries are generally treated as higher-authority than sources it rarely references.
Read definition →Share of Voice (SOV)
Share of voice is the percentage of tracked queries or answers in which a given brand appears, relative to its named competitors, across a defined set of AI-engine responses. It's a comparative metric: it only means something in the context of a specific competitor set and query panel.
Read definition →Entity Authority
Entity authority describes how confidently an AI or search system can resolve that a business is a distinct, real entity (this specific hotel, at this specific address, with these specific attributes) as opposed to being confused with a similarly named property or treated as an ambiguous, low-confidence reference.
Read definition →Structured Data / Schema.org
Structured data is machine-readable markup (most commonly using the schema.org vocabulary, embedded as JSON-LD) that describes a page's content in an explicit, standardized format. For example, it marks up a hotel's name, address, star rating, amenities, and FAQ content using the Hotel and FAQPage schema types, rather than leaving those facts to be inferred from prose.
Read definition →