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. /terms/ai-citation-metrics)
- Source notes and footnote text we author
- Research-citation evidence files we publish
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.
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 the standard permissive content license used by editorial reference work projects (Wikipedia uses CC BY-SA, schema.org reference documentation uses CC BY 3.0, MDN Web Docs uses CC BY-SA 2.5, the sibling AI-search-vocabulary site geo.wiki uses CC BY 4.0). We chose CC BY 4.0 specifically over CC BY-SA because the share-alike clause would prevent integration into commercial reference databases and AI-search training corpora, 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.