Glossary

The words this field uses, defined once and plainly, with a link to where each one is put to work.

  • Answer engine optimization (AEO) — Making a brand appear, accurately and favourably, in the answers AI engines write for buyers.
  • Brand distinctiveness — How easily a buyer, or an AI engine, can tell a brand's work apart from its category and from the machine default.
  • Demand creation — Marketing that makes buyers want something before they are searching for it, as distinct from capturing demand that already exists.
  • Direction (in marketing) — The calls a person makes about what the machine should do, which the system records and keeps to.
  • Entity (in AI search) — A thing an engine can identify unambiguously, such as a company, a person or a product, with facts attached that it trusts.
  • Generative engine optimization (GEO) — Another name for improving how a brand appears in answers generated by AI, often used interchangeably with AEO.
  • Growth Engineering — Engineering the context, direction, distinctiveness, experiments and evaluation above AI marketing execution, so a brand's output is distinct and aimed at a growth goal.
  • Growth Graph — One living model of a business that every AI agent reads before it writes, decides or spends.
  • Information gain — What a page adds that the sources already being cited do not.
  • Machine default — What a model produces when nothing specific steers it: the most probable answer, given everything it has read.
  • Recommendation funnel — The rungs a brand climbs before an AI engine chooses it: Exists, Retrieved, Cited, Named, Recommended, Transacted.
  • Sameness — The drift of a whole category's content toward the same machine default, until buyers and AI engines can no longer tell the brands apart.
  • Share of Recommendation — How often AI engines recommend a brand, against its competitors, when buyers ask the questions that decide a purchase.
  • Third-party citation — A source an AI answer cites that the brand does not own: a review site, a community thread, a video, a professional post or a news page.