Reference
GEO & AI Shopping Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms that decide whether your products get recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The practice of structuring a website's content and data so that generative AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) can read, trust, and recommend it. GEO is to AI assistants what SEO is to search engines.
- AI Shopping
- Product discovery and recommendation that happens inside AI assistants instead of a search results page. A shopper asks an AI what to buy and the assistant surfaces specific products, often with citations to source pages.
- ChatGPT Shopping
- OpenAI's shopping experience inside ChatGPT. It surfaces products from web content indexed by OpenAI's crawlers and weights clear descriptions, FAQs, and product variants.
- Perplexity
- An answer engine that responds to questions with cited sources. For shopping queries it favors pages with strong source quality and citable, well-structured product information.
- Google AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated answers shown above traditional search results. For products it weights GTIN/MPN identifiers, valid schema markup, and pricing freshness.
- Product JSON-LD
- Structured data, written in the JSON-LD format and following schema.org's Product type, that describes a product (name, description, price, GTIN, availability, ratings) in a machine-readable way. It is the single strongest signal for AI shopping readiness.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable markup (usually JSON-LD on schema.org types) that tells engines exactly what a page is about, rather than forcing them to guess from unstructured text.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text/markdown file at a site's root that gives AI systems a curated summary and key links, similar to how robots.txt guides crawlers. It helps LLMs understand and cite a site accurately.
- GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User
- OpenAI's three crawlers. GPTBot collects data for model training; OAI-SearchBot builds the index that surfaces sites in ChatGPT search results; ChatGPT-User fetches a page live when a user action requires it.
- Google-Extended
- A robots.txt permission token that controls whether Google may use your content for its generative AI products. It is independent of Googlebot, so blocking it does not change your classic search rankings, but it can remove you from Google's AI features.
- GTIN / MPN
- Global Trade Item Number and Manufacturer Part Number: standardized product identifiers. AI shopping engines, especially Google AI Overviews, rely on them to match and trust product listings.
- AI citation
- A reference an AI assistant includes when it recommends or quotes a source. Earning citations is the AI-era equivalent of ranking: it is how your store gets surfaced and clicked.
- Crawlability
- Whether AI and search crawlers can actually reach and read your pages. Server-rendered HTML, an open robots.txt for the right bots, and no JavaScript-only content are the basics.