Say it precisely.

A

AI crawler

An automated bot run by an AI company that fetches web pages to train models, build a search index, or answer a user's question in real time.

AI Mode

Google's conversational search mode, where a Gemini-based model answers complex questions with a cited, multi-part response and supports follow-up questions.

AI Overviews

AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, built from its index and linking to supporting web pages.

AI Visibility Score

A 0–100 score summarizing how prominently AI engines mention and cite a brand across a set of tracked prompts.

Answer engine optimization (AEO)

The practice of making a brand easy for AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find, understand, mention and cite.

Answer-first content

Writing that states the direct answer in the opening sentences, then adds supporting detail, so readers and AI engines can lift it cleanly.

Average position

The average rank of a brand's first mention among tracked brands in AI answers that mention it, where 1 means named first.

C

Citation

A link an AI engine attaches to its answer to show which web page supports a statement, usually shown inline or in a sources list.

Citation share

The share of all sources cited in AI answers for your tracked prompts that link to your brand's own domain.

E

Entity

A distinct, identifiable thing such as a company, product, person or place that search and AI systems recognize and connect to facts about it.

F

FAQPage schema

Schema.org structured data that marks up a page's list of questions and answers so machines can read each pair explicitly.

G

Generative engine optimization (GEO)

Optimizing content and brand presence to appear in answers written by generative AI systems; in practice, a near-synonym for answer engine optimization.

Google-Extended

A robots.txt product token that lets site owners control whether Google uses their content to train Gemini models and to ground answers in Gemini Apps.

GPTBot

OpenAI's web crawler for collecting content that may be used to train its generative AI models, controlled with the GPTBot user agent in robots.txt.

Grounding

Connecting an AI model's answer to external sources, such as live search results, so its claims rest on retrieved evidence rather than memory alone.

L

llms.txt

A proposed Markdown file at a site's root that gives AI systems a concise summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.

M

Mention rate

The share of AI answers for your tracked prompts that mention your brand at least once.

N

Net sentiment

The percentage of a brand's AI mentions that are positive minus the percentage that are negative, on a scale from −100 to 100.

P

PerplexityBot

Perplexity's web crawler, which indexes pages so they can be surfaced and linked in Perplexity's answers; Perplexity says it isn't used for model training.

Prompt set

A curated group of tracked prompts, usually organized by topic, that represents the questions a brand's buyers ask AI engines.

Q

Query fan-out

An AI search technique that splits one question into many related sub-queries, runs them in parallel and merges the results into a single answer.

R

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

An AI architecture that retrieves relevant documents from an index or the web and feeds them to a language model before it writes an answer.

S

Share of voice

A brand's mentioned answers as a share of all mentioned answers across the brands you track, showing how often engines name you versus competitors.

Structured data

Machine-readable markup, usually schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, that labels what a page is about: the organization, product, article, author or FAQ it describes.

T

Tracked prompt

A specific question you monitor on a schedule across AI engines, recording each answer to measure whether and how your brand appears.

Z

Zero-click search

A search where the user gets what they need from the results page or AI answer itself and never clicks through to a website.