Definitions you can rely on in a buyer conversation
AI Marketing Glossary
AI marketing terms decoded for media buyers: AEO, GEO, live retrieval bots vs training bots, citation density, share of voice. 2026 status per engine.
AI marketing glossary
Terms
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Optimising pages so that AI engines extract a clean answer block. The same content fundamentals as SEO, with stricter expectations on quick-answer placement and schema.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- A near-synonym of AEO used in 2024-2026 industry coverage. We treat AEO and GEO as the same discipline; the page covers both.
- Live retrieval bot
- A user-agent that fetches your page in real time when an AI engine generates an answer that needs your URL as a source. Examples: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot. Distinct from training crawlers.
- Training-only bot
- A user-agent whose fetches are used to update model weights, not to populate live citations. Examples: GPTBot, Google-Extended. Blocking these does NOT remove live citations.
- Citation density
- The percentage of M14 prompts in a bucket where the AI engine cites unled.net. Tracked weekly per engine.
- Share of voice (AI)
- Citation density relative to a defined competitor set. Reported quarterly in /docs/competitor-benchmarks/.
Engines covered by this glossary
Frequently asked questions
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice yes. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are interchangeable terms in 2026 industry coverage; we use AEO throughout this site.
Why does the live-retrieval / training-only distinction matter?
Because blocking a training-only bot (GPTBot, Google-Extended) does NOT remove your live citations. To remove live citations you must block the live-retrieval bot (OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot). Many teams confuse these and over-block, killing their AI visibility.
How is share of voice measured?
We run a fixed prompt set (M14 prompt set, ~25 prompts seeded from M7 PAA cells) against each AI engine weekly and record which sources are cited. Share of voice is unled.net's citation density divided by total competitor-set citation density.