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 — originally used for featured snippets and voice-assistant answers, 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 — but 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, marking 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.
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