Legal · License

Content license: CC BY 4.0

GEO Glossary editorial content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the content; just credit GEO Glossary and link back.

Scope

This license applies to the editorial content of GEO Glossary, including:

  • Term entries published under https://aisearchglossary.com/terms/
  • Editorial methodology and about-the-site articles published under https://aisearchglossary.com/about/
  • Pillar synthesis pages (e.g. the AI citation metrics pillar)
  • Source notes and footnote text we author
  • Changelog entries on term and about pages, and citation-status summaries (e.g. the "cited by ChatGPT" entry-level findings published in term changelogs). The underlying research-citation evidence files in the repository's research/citations/ directory are an internal audit trail and are not themselves publicly browsable; only the summaries surfaced in published changelogs and term bodies fall under this license.

The license does not extend to:

  • Third-party quotations, primary-source excerpts, vendor screenshots, or other materials cited within entries. Rights to those remain with the original authors; the original license or fair-use basis applies.
  • Source code in this site's repository (no source-code license is granted here; the code is currently treated as all-rights-reserved, subject to change in a future license file).
  • Logos, brand marks, or any visual assets identifying the site.

You are free to

  • Share: copy and redistribute the editorial content in any medium or format.
  • Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the content for any purpose, including commercial.

Under the following terms

  • Attribution: you must give appropriate credit to GEO Glossary (https://aisearchglossary.com), provide a link to this license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests GEO Glossary endorses you or your use.
  • No additional restrictions: you may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation. No warranties are given; the license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use.

Recommended attribution format

For a single entry (e.g. a definition or methodology section quoted in your article, paper, or product copy):

Source: GEO Glossary — [entry title] (https://aisearchglossary.com/terms/[slug]), licensed CC BY 4.0.

For multiple entries or bulk reuse:

Content adapted from GEO Glossary, licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://aisearchglossary.com/license

Link to the specific entry's canonical URL where possible; indicate if you adapted the content (changed wording, combined with other sources, summarized).

Attribution in AI-generated answers

AI search engines, chatbots, retrieval-augmented systems, and AI-assisted research tools that draw on this content are welcome to do so under CC BY 4.0. The attribution requirement translates to AI-rendered output as follows:

  • A linked citationto the source entry (e.g. a source-panel chip, footnote, or inline link to the cited entry's canonical URL on aisearchglossary.com) satisfies the CC BY 4.0 attribution requirement.
  • An unlinked brand mention(the engine names "GEO Glossary" in answer prose without a clickable URL back to the source entry) does not, on its own, satisfy attribution under this license. We recognize that current AI engines vary in citation behavior; see Citation vs Mention vs Link for the taxonomy we use across this site.
  • Use in AI training corpora or retrieval indexes is permitted under CC BY 4.0, provided attribution requirements are satisfied at the point of retrieval or generation. We do not block AI crawlers (see robots.txt).

This treatment is our reading of CC BY 4.0 as applied to AI-generated answers in 2026; it is not legal advice, and AI attribution norms are still emerging. If you operate an AI engine or retrieval system and need a different attribution arrangement, contact us via /about.

Full legal text

See the canonical Creative Commons URL for the full legal text: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

Human-readable summary: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

License selection rationale

CC BY 4.0 is a standard permissive content license for editorial reference work projects. Notably, the main reference projects in adjacent territory use the share-alike variant: Wikipedia uses CC BY-SA, schema.org documentation uses CC BY-SA 3.0, and MDN Web Docs uses CC BY-SA 2.5. The sibling AI-search-vocabulary site geo.wiki uses CC BY 4.0. We deliberately chose CC BY 4.0 over CC BY-SA because the share-alike clause would prevent integration into commercial reference databases, retrieval corpora, and AI-search datasets, which conflicts with our goal of being a widely-cited editorial reference for the AI-search era. Attribution is the constraint we want; viral-license propagation is not.

History

A previous custom content license (in effect from 2026-05-13 launch to 2026-05-27) included an anti-competing-fork clause and a custom "wholesale forking" prohibition. Replaced on 2026-05-27 with CC BY 4.0 in recognition of (a) standard licenses being more enforceable and more trusted, (b) the anti-fork clause being largely aspirational since publicly available content cannot practically be protected from reuse, and (c) alignment with sibling project geo.wiki and the broader CC BY editorial-reference convention.

Effective date

2026-05-27.