What is AI Bot Blocking?
Using robots.txt (or edge rules) to stop AI crawlers from fetching a site. The tradeoff is direct: blocked content cannot be quoted or cited by the assistants doing the blocking.
Related terms
Robots.txt
A plain-text file at the domain root telling compliant crawlers which paths they may fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing: blocked URLs can still be indexed by URL if linked.
Google-Extended
A standalone robots.txt token that opts content out of Google’s AI training corpora without affecting Search indexing or ranking. It does not control AI Overviews grounding.
Citation Share
The share of AI-answer citations in a topic that point to your pages versus competitors. It is the GEO analogue of share of voice: who gets quoted when the model answers money queries.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring pages so answer engines and AI assistants can extract, trust, and quote them: a direct definition up top, scannable steps, quotable facts, and FAQ or Article schema behind them.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization improves how often a brand or page is cited inside AI-generated answers. It combines classic SEO (crawlability, relevance) with quotability: clear facts, named entities, sources, and machine-readable structure.
AI Overviews
Google’s AI-generated summaries at the top of some results pages. They synthesize multiple sources and link to them, which can reduce clicks to publishers even when a page ranks well organically.