iGaming search glossary: AI search, SEO and compliance terms

AI search and answer engines

AEO (answer engine optimization)

Structuring pages so the direct answer to a question appears first, in a short, quotable form, so featured snippets and AI assistants can lift it accurately. For a sportsbook, that means rules, odds and legality pages that answer in the first two sentences. See sportsbook AEO.

GEO (generative engine optimization)

The practice of making a brand easy for AI systems to find, understand and cite correctly. It builds on SEO and adds attention to consistent brand facts and to the third-party sources AI answers rely on. The term comes from a 2023 academic paper; Google describes optimizing for its AI features as "still SEO". See iGaming GEO.

LLM visibility

How often, and how accurately, large language model assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot mention a brand in answers to relevant questions. It is measured with prompt panels rather than rankings.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated summaries shown above some search results, available in more than 200 countries and territories. Pages are eligible if they are indexed and can show a snippet; no special markup is needed.

AI Mode

Google's conversational search mode, where users ask follow-up questions and get AI answers with links. Google reported more than one billion monthly users in 2026. Clicks and impressions are counted in Search Console under the "Web" search type.

Query fan-out

The way Google's AI features turn one question into several background searches and combine the results. It explains why a page can be cited in an AI answer without ranking for the question the user typed.

Grounding

When an AI assistant retrieves live web pages to support its answer instead of relying only on what it learned in training. Bing's AI Performance report shows sample grounding queries for Copilot.

AI crawlers

The bots AI companies use to read websites. They control different things: blocking OAI-SearchBot removes a site from ChatGPT search, GPTBot covers training only, PerplexityBot feeds Perplexity search, and Google-Extended governs Gemini training and grounding but not AI Overviews.

llms.txt

A proposed text file that lists a site's key pages for language models. No major AI search engine has confirmed using it, and Google says it is not needed. Harmless to publish, not worth budget; see what the evidence says about AI optimization tactics.

Measuring AI visibility

Prompt panel

A fixed list of realistic questions, each tied to a market, run on a schedule across AI assistants to measure visibility over time. Freezing the list is what makes month-to-month comparisons fair. See our measurement method.

Mention rate

The share of prompts in a panel where an AI answer names the brand, for example 12 of 60 prompts, or 20%.

Citation

A link in an AI answer pointing to a source page. A citation to your own domain can send traffic; a mention without a citation rarely sends direct traffic.

Citation share

The proportion of all citations across a prompt panel that point to a given domain. In gambling, large affiliates often hold a large citation share, even for questions about operators.

AI share of voice

A brand's share of all brand mentions across a prompt panel, compared with competitors. Useful as a trend, misleading as a single snapshot.

AI impressions

The number of times a page appeared in Google's AI features, shown in Search Console's generative AI performance reports since 2026. These reports show impressions only, not clicks.

Technical SEO for gambling sites

Geo-gate

A control that limits registration or real-money play to users physically located in licensed jurisdictions. Built badly, it also blocks search crawlers, which mostly crawl from US addresses, from seeing informational pages. See casino technical SEO.

Age gate

A prompt asking visitors to confirm their age before entering. If the page content is not in the HTML underneath, crawlers that do not click through may see an empty page.

Canonical tag

A tag telling search engines which URL is the main version of a page. On casino sites it decides which of several near-identical state or province pages gets indexed.

hreflang

An annotation telling Google which language and country a page is for, such as en-US or en-CA. It cannot target US states or Canadian provinces, only countries.

Soft 404

A page that tells users it no longer exists (for example "offer ended") while returning a normal 200 status code. Expired casino promotions are a common source.

Faceted navigation

Filters such as provider, theme or volatility that create new URLs. On large game libraries they can produce millions of crawlable combinations unless controlled.

Core Web Vitals

Google's page experience measurements: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). Heavy game lobbies often struggle on mobile.

Organization schema

Structured data describing the company behind a site, including its name, legal name, logo and official profiles (sameAs). Google says it helps disambiguate an organization. See casino entity SEO.

Content quality and Google policy

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the qualities Google's quality raters are asked to look for. For gambling content it means named authors, sourced facts and visible dates.

YMYL

"Your Money or Your Life": topics where poor information could cause real harm. Google's rater guidelines do not list gambling by name, but the industry generally treats it as close to YMYL because money is at stake.

Scaled content abuse

Google's spam policy against producing many pages mainly to rank, "whether automation, humans or a combination are involved". Hundreds of near-identical state or city pages are a typical gambling example.

Site reputation abuse

Google's policy against third-party content placed on a host site to exploit its ranking signals, such as casino reviews on news or university domains. Since 30 August 2026, manual actions no longer apply inside the EEA, but manual actions still apply elsewhere.

Self-serving reviews

Reviews a business publishes about itself. Google has not shown review rich results for an organization's reviews of itself since 2019, so a casino's own star rating markup does nothing.

Gambling marketing compliance

Inducement

A bonus, credit or offer meant to encourage play. Ontario's AGCO bars advertising inducements publicly; they may appear only on the operator's own site or app, or in messages to players who opted in there.

Safer gambling message

The responsible-gambling wording and help resources a regulator requires in marketing, such as 1-800-GAMBLER in New Jersey or the responsible-gambling message required in every Ontario ad.

Self-exclusion scheme

A register that lets people block themselves from gambling sites, such as GAMSTOP in the UK, ROFUS in Denmark and Spelpaus in Sweden. Marketing must not reach registered players.

Licence page

A page listing a brand's operating entities, regulators and licence numbers per market, linked to each regulator's register. It is the page AI assistants need when asked whether a site is legitimate.

Gambling affiliate

A website or publisher paid to refer players to operators, by revenue share, cost per acquisition or flat fee. Regulators in the UK and Ontario hold operators responsible for affiliate content, and some US states license or register affiliates themselves. See our SEO service for licensed-brand affiliates.

CAP code

The UK's non-broadcast advertising code, enforced by the ASA. Rule 16.3.12 bans gambling ads with "strong appeal" to under-18s, and the ASA has applied the code to affiliates and to operators' own social posts.

AGCO and iGaming Ontario

Ontario's regulated market has two bodies: the AGCO regulates operators and sets the Registrar's Standards, while iGaming Ontario conducts and manages the market. See our Ontario iGaming SEO guide.

UK Gambling Commission

The regulator that licenses gambling operators in Great Britain. Since 19 January 2026 its rules cap bonus wagering requirements at 10x and ban mixed-product bonuses.

Longer explanations of many of these terms are in our iGaming search insights. If a term from a proposal or report is missing here, send it through our contact form and we will add it if it helps others.