AI visibility & GEO glossary.

Agentic commerce is shopping in which AI agents search, compare and sometimes buy products on behalf of a person, within limits that person sets.

Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard, developed by OpenAI and Stripe, that lets AI agents complete purchases with merchants.

AI agents are AI systems that plan and carry out multi-step tasks for a user, such as researching, comparing and buying, using tools and websites.

AI answer volatility is the degree to which AI assistants give different answers, brands or sources to the same prompt across runs, days and models.

AI brand accuracy is how factually correct AI assistants are about your brand, from prices and features to locations, founders and availability.

AI brand mentions are moments when an AI assistant names your brand in its answer, whether as a top recommendation, a list entry or a passing reference.

AI brand sentiment is the tone (positive, neutral or negative) in which AI assistants describe your brand when they mention it in answers.

AI citations are links or source references to your content that an AI assistant shows to back up its answer, a sign the model used and trusted it.

AI content gap analysis finds the prompts and topics where AI assistants mention or cite competitors but not you, and the content needed to close it.

AI crawler analytics is the measurement of which AI bots visit your website, which pages they request and how often, based on server-side data.

AI crawlers are bots that AI companies use to fetch web pages, either to collect training data or to find sources for answers in real time.

AI dark traffic is website traffic driven by AI assistants that analytics tools can't attribute to AI, so it lands in direct or organic reports.

AI hallucinations are false or invented statements that an AI model presents as fact, such as a wrong price, a made-up feature or a fake source.

AI referral traffic is the website traffic that arrives when people click a link in an AI assistant's answer, for example in ChatGPT or Perplexity.

AI reputation management is monitoring and improving how AI assistants describe your brand, from correcting errors to strengthening trusted sources.

AI SEO is search engine optimization adapted to AI-powered search, so your pages are found, understood and cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

AI share of voice is the percentage of all brand mentions in AI answers about your category that go to your brand rather than to competitors.

AI visibility is how often, how prominently and how positively your brand appears in answers from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

AI Visibility Score is a single metric that sums up how often, how prominently and how favorably AI assistants present your brand in their answers.

Answer engines are search systems that reply to a question with a direct, written answer instead of a list of links, often citing their sources.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines can use it as the direct answer to a user's question.

Answer-first content is writing that gives the direct answer to a question in the first sentence or two, before adding context, detail and examples.

Average position is the mean rank at which your brand appears in AI answers that list several brands, where position 1 means you are named first.

Category prompts are unbranded questions about a product or service category, such as 'best CRM for startups', used to see which brands AI recommends.

ChatGPT Ads are paid, clearly labeled advertisements shown in ChatGPT separately from the answer, which OpenAI announced it was testing in early 2026.

ChatGPT Shopping is the set of product results in ChatGPT answers, with images, prices, reviews and merchant links, shown for questions with buying intent.

Citability is how easy it is for an AI system to find, understand, trust and quote a passage from your content as a source in its answer.

Citation rate is the percentage of tracked AI answers that use and link your website or content as a source, a key measure of authority in AI search.

Citation share is the percentage of all source citations in tracked AI answers that point to your domain rather than to other websites.

Cited sources are the domains and pages that AI answers link to or rely on for a prompt, from your own site to review platforms, media and forums.

Co-citation is when two brands or websites are mentioned together by a third source, which tells search engines and AI models that they are related.

Competitor benchmarking compares your performance with a fixed set of competitors on the same metrics, showing where you lead and where you lag.

Content freshness is how current your content is and how clearly it shows it, which affects whether search engines and AI assistants trust and use it.

Context window refers to the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that an AI model can process at once, including the prompt, sources and answer.

Conversational search is searching through a natural-language dialogue with an AI system that keeps context, so you can refine with follow-ups.

Deep Research is an agentic mode in AI assistants that runs many web searches over several minutes and writes a detailed report with cited sources.

Digital PR is earning coverage, brand mentions and links on online publications through newsworthy stories, data and expert commentary.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the quality framework Google's raters use to judge content.

Earned media is publicity you don't pay for or own, such as press coverage, reviews, social shares and recommendations by others.

Embeddings are lists of numbers that capture the meaning of a text, so AI systems can find content that means the same thing even when the words differ.

Entity optimization is the practice of making your brand, products and people clearly recognizable entities that search engines and AI models understand.

A featured snippet is a highlighted box at the top of Google's results that answers a query with an excerpt from one web page and a link to it.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting your brand mentioned, cited and recommended in answers written by AI models.

Google AI Mode is a conversational, Gemini-powered search mode in Google Search that answers complex questions and lets you ask follow-ups.

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries at the top of some Google search results that answer the query and link to the sources they use.

Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that lets sites control whether Google uses their content to train and ground Gemini, without affecting Search.

Grounding ties an AI model's answer to verifiable sources, such as search results or documents, so the answer rests on facts instead of memory alone.

Indexing is the process in which search engines store and organize crawled pages, so they can be retrieved for search results and AI answers.

Knowledge cutoff refers to the date on which an AI model's training data ends, so later events are unknown to it unless it can search the web.

The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of entities and the facts that connect them, and the source behind knowledge panels in search results.

Large language models (LLMs) are AI models trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language; they power ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

LLM Optimization (LLMO) is the practice of shaping what large language models know and say about your brand, so their answers are accurate and favorable.

llms.txt is a proposed markdown file at the root of a website that gives large language models a short summary of the site and links to its key pages.

Mention rate is the percentage of tracked prompts in which an AI assistant names your brand in its answer, also known as presence rate.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, that defines how AI assistants connect to external tools and data.

Product carousels are rows of product cards with images, prices, ratings and store links that AI assistants show for questions with buying intent.

Prompts are the questions or instructions you give an AI model; in AI visibility tracking, they are fixed questions that show which brands appear.

Prompt research is finding and prioritizing the questions your buyers ask AI assistants: the AI counterpart of keyword research.

Prompt tracking is running a fixed set of prompts through AI assistants on a schedule to see whether, where and how they mention your brand.

Prompt volume is an estimate of how often people ask AI assistants about a given question or topic, the AI counterpart of keyword search volume.

Query fan-out is a technique where an AI search system splits one question into several related sub-queries, runs them at once and combines the results.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a method in which an AI model first fetches relevant sources and then writes its answer based on them.

robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers, including AI crawlers, which pages they may or may not fetch.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in the unpaid results of search engines like Google and Bing.

Search intent is the goal behind a search query or AI prompt: learning something, finding a site, comparing options or buying.

Semantic search is a search method that interprets the meaning and intent behind a query instead of only matching its exact keywords.

SERP stands for search engine results page: the page a search engine shows after a query, with organic results, ads, AI answers and other features.

Server-side rendering (SSR) means the server builds a page's complete HTML before sending it, so browsers and crawlers receive the content right away.

Structured data, or schema markup, is code that labels the facts on a page in a standard format so search engines and AI systems can read them reliably.

Tokens are the small chunks of text, such as words, parts of words or punctuation, that AI language models read, count and generate.

Topical authority is how strongly search engines and AI models see a site as a go-to source on a subject, earned by covering it in depth.

Training data is the collection of text, code and other content an AI model learns from, and it shapes what the model knows about your brand.

White-label reporting means delivering reports from a third-party tool under your own brand, with your logo and styling instead of the vendor's.

Zero-click search is a search that ends without a click to any website, because the answer already appears on the results page or in an AI answer.