Glossary
The language of AI visibility
Getting recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity has its own vocabulary, GEO, AEO, mention rate, RAG, AI Overviews. Here's every term explained in plain English, with how it actually affects your business.
Fundamentals
AI Visibility
AI visibility is how often, how prominently, and how favorably AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity name and cite your business when they answer a customer's question.
Read →Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of increasing how often and how favorably AI assistants mention and cite your brand in the answers they generate.
Read →Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content and presence so answer engines, AI assistants and AI search, pull from you when they respond to a question.
Read →Answer Engine
An answer engine is a system that responds to a query with a single synthesized answer instead of a ranked list of links, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Gemini are examples.
Read →LLM SEO
LLM SEO is search optimization aimed at large language models, making your brand more likely to be named and cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity rather than only ranked by Google.
Read →Metrics
Mention Rate
Mention rate is the share of AI answers, across your tracked questions and assistants, in which your business is actually named.
Read →Citation Rate
Citation rate is the share of AI answers that link to or explicitly source your website when they mention you, the AI-era equivalent of earning a backlink inside the answer.
Read →Share of Voice (AI)
AI share of voice is your portion of all business mentions in the answers for your category, how much of the conversation the assistants give you versus your competitors.
Read →AI Visibility Score
An AI visibility score is a single 0-100 index that rolls up mention rate, citation rate, and ranking into one number so you can track your standing in AI answers at a glance.
Read →AI Sentiment
AI sentiment is the tone of how assistants describe your business when they name it, positive, neutral, or negative, which shapes the customer's impression before they ever reach you.
Read →Surfaces
Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google places at the top of many search results, answering the query directly and often naming a few businesses above the traditional links.
Read →Google AI Mode
Google AI Mode is Google's conversational, answer-first search experience, a full chat-style interface that responds to complex queries with synthesized answers and follow-ups rather than a page of links.
Read →Zero-Click Search
A zero-click search is a query the user resolves without clicking through to any website, because the answer, increasingly an AI-generated one, is served directly on the results page.
Read →Local Pack
The local pack (or map pack) is the block of three map-based business listings Google shows for local-intent searches, and while it's a classic SEO target, AI answers are becoming a separate, parallel shortlist you also have to win.
Read →ChatGPT Search
ChatGPT Search is ChatGPT's ability to browse the live web and answer with current information and cited sources, turning the assistant into an answer engine that can name and link real businesses.
Read →Perplexity
Perplexity is an answer engine that responds to questions with a synthesized, source-cited answer, one of the most citation-forward AI surfaces, which makes it a key place to track your visibility.
Read →Tactics
Entity SEO
Entity SEO is optimizing around your business as a distinct real-world entity, its name, category, attributes, and relationships, rather than around individual keywords, so machines understand and recommend you confidently.
Read →Structured Data (Schema.org)
Structured data is machine-readable markup (usually Schema.org JSON-LD) added to your website that spells out facts about your business, name, category, location, hours, reviews, in a format search and AI systems can parse precisely.
Read →Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is your free business listing on Google Search and Maps, and it's one of the single most influential sources AI assistants draw on when they recommend a local business.
Read →Citations (AI)
In the AI-answer context, a citation is a source link an assistant shows to back up its response, being cited both sends referral traffic and signals to the model that you're a reference worth reusing.
Read →Topical & Brand Authority
Topical and brand authority is the depth and credibility of your presence around a subject, the accumulated signal, across many trusted sources, that tells AI models you're a legitimate answer to recommend.
Read →Buyer-Intent Prompt
A buyer-intent prompt is the actual question a customer types into an AI assistant when they're ready to choose, 'who's the best roofer in Dallas?', and it's the unit AI-visibility monitoring is built on.
Read →Technical
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique where an AI model retrieves relevant documents from the live web or a database and uses them to ground its answer, instead of relying only on what it memorized during training.
Read →Grounding
Grounding is connecting an AI model's answer to verifiable external sources, search results, databases, or documents, so its claims are anchored in real, current information rather than generated from memory alone.
Read →AI Hallucination
A hallucination is when an AI model states something false or fabricated with confidence, inventing a fact, a source, or a business detail that isn't real.
Read →Knowledge Graph
A knowledge graph is a structured map of real-world entities, businesses, people, places, and the relationships between them, which search and AI systems use to understand who you are and what you do.
Read →llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that offers AI systems a curated, easy-to-read guide to the site's most important content, an LLM-oriented cousin of robots.txt and sitemap.xml.
Read →Enough theory, where do you actually stand?
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