The eCommerce Insights glossary of AI-search terms.
Thirty definitions for GEO, AEO, ACO, LLM SEO, and the practitioner terms around them. eCommerce Insights stays neutral on the naming war and tries to get each term right.
Core category terms
The terms the industry uses to name this whole space. eCommerce Insights uses GEO as the umbrella when forced to pick, defines AEO as Answer Engine Optimization by default, and treats ACO as 's coined term for the ecommerce-specific slice.
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of optimizing content, products, and entities so generative AI engines surface, cite, and recommend them.
COREAEO
Answer Engine Optimization — optimizing content to be cited in AI-generated answers. eCommerce Insights uses this definition; uses "Agent Engine Optimization" instead.
COREACO
Agentic Commerce Optimization — coined by . Preparing product catalogs so AI shopping agents can evaluate, compare, and recommend them.
CORELLM SEO
Near-synonym for GEO. Practitioner term emphasizing large language models as the optimization target.
COREAI SEO
Umbrella term for SEO practices adapted for AI-powered search surfaces, including Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and standalone AI assistants.
COREAI search engine optimization
Plain-English expansion of AI SEO. Covers optimization for any AI-powered search surface a customer actually uses.
COREAI engine optimization
Generalist phrasing for GEO. Used interchangeably by some practitioners, less specific than GEO on which engines are meant.
eCommerce Insights terms
The seven phrases eCommerce Insights uses to describe what changes when you track AI visibility at SKU granularity instead of brand granularity. Two are wedge terms eCommerce Insights owns; the others are industry phrases eCommerce Insights defines precisely.
Product AI visibility
The extent to which a specific product is surfaced, cited, or recommended by AI shopping and search engines. Measured per-SKU, per-engine, per-query-intent.
SHELFSCOPESKU-level AEO
The discipline of optimizing individual product-detail pages, schema, and metadata so AI engines cite specific SKUs, not only the parent brand.
SHELFSCOPEAI visibility
The aggregate of a brand or product's presence across AI engines: citation count, citation surface, and source mix.
SHELFSCOPEAI visibility score
A composite score for a SKU's readiness to be cited: schema completeness, entity clarity, answer coverage, and review signal.
SHELFSCOPEAI brand visibility
A brand's share of AI answers across relevant prompts. The common starting point before teams move to SKU-level measurement.
SHELFSCOPELLM visibility
Visibility inside large language model outputs, whether via the model's trained weights or its retrieval step.
SHELFSCOPEAI discoverability
Whether an AI engine can locate a product when a buyer's query should lead to it. The prerequisite for visibility.
Practitioner terms
The vocabulary SEO practitioners, analysts, and AI-search vendors actually use day-to-day. eCommerce Insights defines each neutrally and notes when the term is contested or newly coined.
Citation analysis
Examining which URLs and sources AI engines cite in answers, for which queries, and how often.
PRACTITIONERBrand mentions
Raw count of a brand's appearances in AI answers, whether or not they resolve to a specific product.
PRACTITIONERPrompt monitoring
Tracking a fixed set of prompts across AI engines over time to detect shifts in how they're answered.
PRACTITIONERPrompt tracking
Synonym for prompt monitoring. The term practitioners use for rank-tracking's AI-era analogue.
PRACTITIONERShare of model
A brand or product's share of mentions inside a given AI engine's answers, relative to a defined competitive set.
PRACTITIONERShare of voice (AI)
Share-of-voice adapted to AI: a brand's percentage of total mentions within a tracked prompt set.
PRACTITIONERHallucination detection
Finding AI-generated claims about a brand or product that aren't true — wrong specs, wrong price, wrong feature set.
PRACTITIONERAI sentiment
The tone — positive, neutral, negative — of how AI engines characterize a brand or product across prompts.
PRACTITIONERAI reputation
The aggregate impression of a brand across AI engines: what they say, how often, and with what sentiment.
PRACTITIONERAI traffic analytics
Attribution and behavior analysis for visits that originate from AI-engine answer clicks.
PRACTITIONERllms.txt
A proposed plain-text file served at the site root that gives AI crawlers a curated summary of the site.
PRACTITIONERQuery fan-out
An AI engine expanding a user's single query into several sub-queries to assemble a richer answer.
PRACTITIONERAgentic commerce
Commerce conducted by or mediated through AI agents — recommendation, comparison, and increasingly purchase.
PROTOCOLACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
OpenAI/Stripe/Meta open spec, Apache 2.0. Powers ChatGPT Instant Checkout. Five merchant endpoints plus Stripe Delegate Payment.
PROTOCOLUCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)
Google-led open spec announced 2026-01-11 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart. Often misnamed "Unified Content Protocol" in early coverage.
PRACTITIONERShopify Agentic Storefronts
Shopify's channel that wraps UCP and the OpenAI relationship for Shopify merchants. Documented at shopify.dev/docs/agents.
PROTOCOLAP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
Google's sister protocol to UCP. UCP orchestrates lifecycle; AP2 handles secure agent-led payments.
PROTOCOLVault token (vs SPT)
SPT is the credential type name in ACP. Vault token (vt_...) is the artifact Stripe issues at /delegate_payment.
PRACTITIONERAgentic Readiness Report
A per-SKU readiness score for whether an AI shopping agent could evaluate, compare, and recommend the product.
PRACTITIONERPDP optimization
Improving a product-detail page's content, schema, and metadata so it performs better in both human and AI search.
PRACTITIONERProduct schema
Structured data marking up a product: name, SKU, GTIN, brand, price, availability, and review signals.
Related reading
- What is Generative Engine Optimization — the pillar guide behind the GEO glossary entry.
- What is Answer Engine Optimization — eCommerce Insights's reading of AEO, including the alternative.
- What is Agentic Commerce Optimization — ACO defined without ceding the space to .
- Product AI visibility — the wedge pillar.
- SKU-level AEO — the other wedge pillar.
Bookmark the glossary.
The category still argues about names. eCommerce Insights keeps the definitions current and linked, so your team has one reference they can trust.