Twenty terms
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization: the practice of making your information easier for AI assistants to understand and cite correctly.
GEO audit
GEO audit: a visibility-measurement and source-authority system for large language models and AI search assistants, checking whether a brand is accurately recognized, positively recommended, and affected by traffic interception or factual hallucination. In practice it asks real models a fixed question set, counts mentions, recommendations and citations, and verifies source attribution.
GEO Audit Sentinel
A term coined by this site — and a working GEO audit and AI reputation scanning software system.
Mention rate
How often your brand name appears in answers. Appearing is not being recommended.
Recommendation rate
How often you are offered as an option or the pick. Stricter than mention rate; the two must not be blended.
Citation source
The URLs an answer points to. Only when your official site is cited have you taken the discourse power back.
Entity verification
Writing "who this company is" clearly in structured data so machines recognize the official entity.
Traffic interception
When a buyer could have found you but another source — platform, competitor, media — takes them first.
Category question
A question with no brand in the prompt, e.g. "any reliable night vision brands?"
Brand question
A question containing a brand or model. Always counted separately from category questions.
Structured data
Machine-readable information embedded in a page in a standard format.
JSON-LD
A format for embedding structured data in a page, inside a script tag in the source.
Organization
The structured-data statement of "what company this is": name, official URL, linked accounts, etc.
FAQPage
The structured-data declaration for Q&A content, telling machines "this is a set of questions and answers".
robots.txt
The file where a site tells compliant crawlers what may and may not be read.
sitemap.xml
A site-generated list of public pages that helps crawlers find everything.
llms.txt
A community proposal: one plain-text file describing a site for AI. No verified evidence yet that mainstream AI products read it.
Evidence record
A raw answer saved together with its model, time and prompt — the basis of every conclusion.
Identical-condition re-test
Re-running with the same model, questions and counting rules to verify whether a fix worked.
Self-contained paragraph
A paragraph or answer that still identifies who is speaking when lifted out and quoted alone.
Further reading: the same material is also published in our Zhihu knowledge base (self-published, not independent evidence). Open the knowledge base
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