The language of AI-native advertising.

The practice of structuring content so AI assistants select it when composing answers. AEO targets the answer itself; classic SEO targets a ranked list of links. The two overlap in craft but differ in what winning looks like: a citation inside one response versus a position on a page of ten.

Advertising designed for AI surfaces from the start rather than adapted from search or social formats. The unit of placement is a conversation, so targeting, copy, and measurement all begin from the prompt instead of the keyword.

Any AI system that responds to a question with one composed answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews all qualify. The defining property for advertisers: there is no page two.

OpenAI’s native sponsored unit inside ChatGPT: a labeled card that appears after the assistant’s answer, carrying a brand name, description, and action. It never modifies the answer itself.

Paid placements inside ChatGPT conversations, shown as labeled sponsored cards after the organic answer. Targeting is contextual: it keys off what the conversation is about, not who the user is.

InPromptAds’ term for the sponsored card as buyers actually experience it: a recommendation-shaped unit that arrives after the answer, aligned to the prompt, and written to add information the answer left out.

The organic discipline of earning citations and mentions inside AI-generated answers. GEO is to answer engines what SEO was to search engines. Paid placement is its complement, not its replacement: GEO earns presence over months, placement buys it this week.

The gap between what an AI answer already told the buyer and what a brand can still add. Prompt-aligned ad copy carries only the delta, because repeating the answer wastes the one placement you get.

How often, and how favorably, a brand appears across large language model answers for its category prompts. The organic baseline that paid placement builds on top of.

Ad strategy that treats the prompt, not the keyword, as the unit of intent. A keyword guesses what someone wants. A prompt states it outright, with context, constraints, and decision stage attached.

The mapped universe of prompts where a category gets discussed, classified by whether the brand is present, a competitor appears instead, or nobody appears at all. The first layer of the InPromptAds methodology.

The pause right after a buyer reads an AI answer: cognitive load drops while attention stays on the topic. The sponsored card lands in that window, which is why conversational placements read so differently from interruptive formats.