The AI visibility glossary.
Plain definitions of the terms behind how AI engines answer, cite and recommend, each with its source.
A
- AI crawlerAn AI crawler is a bot an AI company uses to fetch web pages, whether to train models, to build a search index for its answers or to read a page a user asked about.
- AI referral trafficAI referral traffic is the visits that reach your website from links in AI assistants' answers, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.
- AI searchAI search is search in which a generative AI model writes an answer to the query from web sources, usually with links, instead of returning only a ranked list of pages.
- AI sentimentAI sentiment is a score for how favorably AI answers describe your brand, averaged across the answers that name you.
- AI share of voiceAI share of voice is your brand's mentions in AI answers as a share of all mentions of you and the competitors you track.
- AI visibilityAI visibility is how often AI engines name your brand when they answer the questions your buyers ask, measured as the share of runs whose answer names you.
- Answer engineAn answer engine is a search tool that replies to a question with a direct, written answer drawn from the sources it finds, instead of a list of links.
- Answer engine optimizationAnswer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of preparing your content so AI assistants and answer engines can find it, understand it and use it in their answers.
- Average positionAverage position is your brand's average place among the brands named in the AI answers that name you, where 1 means named first, so lower is better.
C
- CitationA citation is a link to a source page that an AI answer shows to back up what it says.
- Citation gapA citation gap is a page AI engines cite for your buyers' questions that names one or more of your competitors but not your brand.
- Co-mentionA co-mention is an AI answer that names your brand and a competitor together, so the buyer sees both on the same shortlist.
E
- E-E-A-TE-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the aspects of content quality Google describes and its raters assess.
- EntityAn entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a company, product, person or place, that search engines and AI models recognize and connect to facts about it.
G
- Generative engine optimizationGenerative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often AI engines name your brand and cite your pages in the answers they generate.
- Google AI ModeGoogle AI Mode is a conversational mode in Google Search that answers complex questions with an AI-generated response, links to the web and follow-up questions.
- Google AI OverviewsGoogle AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries shown at the top of some Google Search results, with key information and links to the pages behind them.
- Google-ExtendedGoogle-Extended is a robots.txt product token that controls whether Google may use a site's content to train Gemini models and to ground answers in Gemini Apps.
- GroundingGrounding is connecting an AI model's answer to verifiable sources, such as search results or a company's own documents, so the answer can cite what it says.
L
- Large language modelA large language model (LLM) is an AI model with a very large number of parameters that generates text by predicting what is likely to come next.
- llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed markdown file at a website's root that gives AI models a short summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.