Sources
Established definitions and technical claims on this site are grounded in research papers and official platform documentation wherever possible.
Primary and official references
- Google SEO Starter Guide — Foundational Google Search guidance.
- Google’s Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features — Official guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- AI Features and Your Website — Technical requirements, query fan-out and controls.
- Google Robots.txt Introduction — How Google interprets crawler access.
- Google Structured Data Introduction — How structured data describes visible page content.
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — The 2023 research paper formalizing GEO.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks — The 2020 RAG research paper.
- Google Cloud RAG Overview — Current technical explanation of RAG.
- OpenAI Publishers and Developers FAQ — OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT search and referral tracking.
- Perplexity Crawler Documentation — Official PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User information.
- Microsoft Guidance for Public Websites — Public website indexing and generative-answer readiness.
- Robots Exclusion Protocol RFC 9309 — The standardized robots.txt protocol.
- Schema.org DefinedTerm — Vocabulary used for term definitions.
How original and established terms are handled
SEO, Google AI features and crawler controls: explained using official documentation.
GEO and RAG: connected to the academic papers that introduced or formalized the terms.
AEO and AIO: described as industry language with meanings that can vary by context.
REG: explicitly identified as Dean Jessop’s original framework rather than an outside platform standard.
Update policy
Search and AI products change quickly. Pages should be reviewed when official platform guidance, crawler controls, terminology or product names change materially.
The site includes visible publication and modification dates in page metadata and structured data. When content is updated after deployment, both the page text and structured data dates should be changed together.
What sources cannot prove
No documentation can prove that a specific page will be selected for a future answer. Official sources explain requirements, controls and product behaviour; they do not provide a guarantee of indexing, ranking, citation or recommendation.