AI & AEO

Voice Search

Quick Definition

Voice search is the use of spoken queries to search engines via Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and modern voice-enabled AI assistants like ChatGPT Voice and Perplexity Voice.

In context

Voice queries skew longer, more conversational, and more local-intent than typed queries — 'where's the closest 24-hour pharmacy in Liberty Village' rather than 'pharmacy liberty village 24 hours'. Optimising: cover question-shaped phrases in content, use FAQ schema, write in natural conversational language, mark up location and hours data precisely, and include SpeakableSpecification schema on the answer paragraph. Voice search results frequently come from featured snippets and AI Overviews, so optimising for those surfaces also covers voice.

Example

A Toronto pharmacy added SpeakableSpecification schema to its hours and address sections; Google Assistant now reads the answer aloud verbatim for 'pharmacy near me hours' voice queries.

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Related terms

Citation Staleness

Citation staleness is the gap between when AI engines were last updated to reflect your latest content and when those citations actually reflect current information — typically days to weeks for dominant AI search surfaces.

Chain-of-Thought Search

Chain-of-thought search refers to AI engines that decompose a query into a visible reasoning chain, retrieving and citing sources at each reasoning step.

AIO (AI Optimization)

AIO is an emerging umbrella term covering all forms of optimization for AI surfaces — AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — across both retrieval and citation contexts.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) are AI-generated answers that appear at the top of Google search results for many queries.

Model Knowledge Cutoff

The knowledge cutoff is the date beyond which an LLM has no training data — historically a hard limit, now mitigated by retrieval-augmented generation in modern AI search.

Semantic Chunking

Semantic chunking is how AI retrieval systems break long content into smaller, semantically coherent passages that can be retrieved and cited independently.

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