A glossary of the acronyms being sold to you

An answer engine is any system that responds to a question with a written answer rather than a list of links: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google's own AI Overviews. It reads sources, composes a reply, and usually names a handful of them. The consequence for a business is structural: where a results page offered ten positions, an answer offers two or three names.

Not the same asNot a search engine with a chat box bolted on. A search engine ranks documents and lets the reader choose; an answer engine chooses for them and reports the outcome.

Answer engine optimisation is the practice of building a page so that an answer engine can lift a complete answer from it and name the business as the source. In practice that means question-shaped headings, answers that are self-contained in the first paragraph beneath them, consistent facts about the business across every place it appears, and markup that states plainly what the page is.

Not the same asNot a separate product bolted onto a site. Almost everything AEO asks for is what a well-built page was supposed to do anyway; the difference is that a human reader forgives a page that buries its answer and a model simply skips it.

Generative engine optimisation is the same goal as AEO approached from the generation side: influencing what a model writes about a category, rather than only what it cites. It concerns itself with how a business is described across the whole web (directories, coverage, its own pages) because a generated answer is assembled from an impression of a business, not from one document.

Not the same asNot a meaningfully different discipline from AEO, whatever the invoice says. The two terms were coined by different people for overlapping work, and anybody selling them as two products should be asked what the second one does that the first does not.

Search engine optimisation is the work of making a site rank in a conventional results page: crawlable structure, pages that load quickly, one clear subject per page, internal links that make the hierarchy obvious, and content somebody actually wants. It is the oldest of these terms and the only one with thirty years of public documentation behind it.

Not the same asNot obsolete, and not replaced by AEO. Answer engines are largely reading pages that search engines already found and understood; a site that fails at search usually fails at being quoted for exactly the same reasons.

Structured data is a machine-readable block inside a page that states what the page is about in a shared vocabulary: that this is a business, that this is its phone number, that this article has this author and this date. Search engines use it to understand a document without inferring, and to decide whether it qualifies for enhanced results.

Not the same asNot a ranking factor, and not a way to make a page eligible to be cited by an assistant. There is no schema type that does that, no matter who is selling one.

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain-text file at the root of a site giving a model a written account of what the site contains, in the way robots.txt gives a crawler a set of rules. It is cheap to publish and easy to keep accurate if it is generated from the site's own content rather than written by hand.

Not the same asNot yet an adopted standard, and not a substitute for the page itself. This site publishes one because it is generated from the site's own content and can be audited in a click.

Entity consistency means every public mention of a business (its own site, its Google Business Profile, directories, social profiles) states the same name, the same number and the same description, character for character. It matters more for generated answers than for ranking, because a model assembling a reply about a business is reconciling several sources and inconsistency reads to it as uncertainty.

Not the same asNot the same as having many listings. Twenty listings that disagree about the phone number are worse than three that agree.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts a business into Google Maps and the local results, carrying its hours, contact details, photographs and reviews. Verification can take weeks, which is why it is the first thing to start and the last thing most checklists mention. A service business without a storefront can list as a service-area business and hide the address.

Not the same asNot optional for a local business on the grounds of having no shopfront, and not a substitute for a website; the profile is a record about a business, whereas the site is the thing an answer engine reads to find out what it actually does.