A guide to the words your marketing agency is about to start throwing around. Translated by Therese, who lives on Johns Island and has strong opinions about both schema markup and sweet tea.
AI Recommendation Optimization
Optimizing a business's online presence so AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) understand, trust, and recommend it for relevant queries. The emerging standard for search optimization in the age of AI. Methodology created by Therese Grittner, TaG Makes.
A proprietary numeric score measuring how well an AI platform understands and recommends a business. Calculated across seven signals from real audit data, not projections. Higher score means AI is more likely to recommend that business.
A live, continuously updated, becoming-national database of AI recommendation rankings built from real audit data across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Ranks businesses by category and market. The first index of its kind.
Here's the honest truth most people won't tell you: the industry hasn't agreed on what any of them mean. That's not your knowledge gap. That's the industry's. Here's each one in plain English, and where every single one of them stops short.
Remember waving your hand so hard in school you nearly fell out of your chair? AEO teaches your website to do that, but for robots.
ChatGPT doesn't show ten results. It picks one. Be the one.
That one person at a dinner party with the best stories and the receipts. That's GEO for your website.
If ChatGPT is writing about "best plastic surgeons in Charleston," you want your name in that paragraph.
The broadest umbrella term. Covers everything: chatbots, AI search, voice assistants, recommendation engines, AI Overviews.
It's so broad it's almost meaningless. When someone sells you "AIO," ask them what they actually measure. If they can't answer, that's your answer.
A narrower practice focused on whether your brand is in the training data and how the model describes you.
Honestly? It's a big-brand concern. You don't control what's in OpenAI's training data. You do control what's on your website.
The plain-language catch-all. "SEO but for AI." It's what most people actually type into a search bar.
It's the term you probably used to find this page. Welcome. Now here's what it usually leaves out.
New acronyms appear every few months. GAIO is functionally identical to GEO. SEvO is another umbrella.
The acronym churn is a feature of an immature market, not a sign of real difference.
The grocery label for your website. Structured HTML tags that tell AI and search engines what your business is, where you are, and why you matter. Without it, AI guesses. With it, AI knows.
Breadcrumbs across the web that prove your business is real. Your name spelled the same way on your website, Google Business, LinkedIn, and local directories. Inconsistency erodes trust. Consistency builds it.
The AI-generated summary that appears above Google's regular links. Shows up for complex queries and trusted sources. If you're optimized for it, you're above the fold before the fold.
Handing the AI a flash card. Structured markup that explicitly shows AI which question your page answers and what the answer is. Fast to implement, high return.
Read the whole internet, never sleeps, won't judge you. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are all built on LLMs. They don't search in real time. They predict based on patterns. Your job is to be a pattern.
Whether AI can actually read your site. A site built on certain platforms is like a book glued shut in invisible ink. The content might be great. Nobody can get to it.
The difference between twenty years of Lowcountry cooking versus one googled recipe. AI gives weight to sources that go deep on a topic, not sources that mention everything once.
Name, Address, Phone. Therese vs T. Grittner vs Terry G. They're all you, but AI doesn't know that. Pick one version. Use it everywhere.
Be the spreadsheet, not the paragraph. Machines parse structured data faster and more reliably than prose. Structured data tells AI exactly what kind of thing you are.
Asking Siri the time. The answer appears without clicking a link. If your content shows up in zero-click, you're the source. If it doesn't, you don't exist for that query.
Google meets ChatGPT with footnotes. Real-time AI search that cites its sources. Shows up as a competitor recommendation engine for local searches. Growing fast among younger buyers.
The thoughtful friend who reads the whole article. "Hey Claude, who does AI search optimization in Charleston?" is a real question. TaG Makes shows up. Does your business?