AI visibility glossary
Short, plain explanations of the terms in this field.
A
- AEO
Writing pages so that systems that answer questions directly can quote them easily.
- AI Mode
A Google search mode that lets you continue a question like a conversation and builds the answer with AI.
- AI Overviews
Google's AI summary shown above the results for some searches, together with source links.
- AI visibility
How often and how a brand is mentioned in AI answers from engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
- Answerability
Whether a page gives a clear, short and quotable answer to a specific question.
C
- Canonical tag
A tag that says which URL should count as the main one when the same content lives at several URLs.
- Citation
A page or domain an AI answer shows as the source of its information.
- ClaudeBot
Anthropic's crawler that collects web content.
E
G
- GEO
The umbrella name for work that helps a brand get mentioned more often and more accurately in AI answers.
- Google-Extended
The name you use in robots.txt to decide whether your content is used to train Gemini models and in answers in Gemini apps.
- GPTBot
OpenAI's crawler that collects web content for model training.
- Grounding
When a model builds its answer on pages it searches on the web at that moment, not only on what it already knows.
H
- Hallucination
When a language model confidently states information that is wrong or made up.
J
- JSON-LD
Structured data code that describes company, product or article information on a page in a tidy format machines can read.
L
- llms.txt
A proposed file at the site root that lists important pages for language models in Markdown.
M
- Mention rate
The percentage of measured answers in which the brand name appears.
O
- OAI-SearchBot
The crawler OpenAI uses to find sites to show in ChatGPT search results.
P
- PerplexityBot
The crawler Perplexity uses to index pages it shows in its search results.
- Prompt set
The list of questions a customer might really ask, sent to the engines on a regular schedule to measure visibility.
R
- Readiness score
A number from 0 to 100 that measures, with 56 controls, how ready a site is to be read by search engines and AI bots.
- Render gap
The content difference between a page's raw HTML and how it looks in the browser after JavaScript runs.
- robots.txt
A plain text file at the site root that says which bot may crawl which URLs.
S
- Sample and repeats
How many questions and engines a visibility result is based on, and how many times each question was asked.
- Sentiment analysis
Classifying whether an AI answer talks about a brand in a positive, neutral, negative or mixed tone.
- Share of voice
The brand's share of all mentions, counted together with the tracked competitors, for the same questions.
V
- Visibility score
A number from 0 to 100 that sums up the brand's mention rate, position and competitive share for the chosen questions.
W
- White-label report
A report an agency sends to its client under its own logo, color and name, without the platform provider in front.
Z
- Zero-click search
When a user gets the answer on the results page or in an AI answer and leaves without clicking any site.