AI visibility · glossary
Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms used across this site. New here? Start with the overview.
- AI visibility
- How a company is represented in the answers AI assistants generate: whether it is recognized, accurately described, fairly compared, recommended, and cited.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- The practice of improving how a company appears in the direct answers given by AI assistants and answer engines.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The practice of improving how a company is represented and cited in answers produced by generative AI. The term was introduced in academic research in 2023.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- The practice of improving a page's ranking in traditional search results. The predecessor discipline to AEO and GEO, with overlapping but distinct techniques.
- AI assistant (answer engine)
- A tool that answers questions in natural language by synthesizing information, often from the web — for example ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI answers, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude.
- ACE
- The method written about on this site: Audit, Correct, Engineer — then Measure and Monitor — the cycle for improving and maintaining a company's AI visibility.
- Entity recognition
- Whether an AI assistant correctly identifies a company as a distinct, real entity, rather than confusing it with others that share the name.
- Name collision
- When several unrelated entities share a name, making it harder for an AI assistant to recognize the specific one a person means.
- Structured data (schema)
- Machine-readable markup — often JSON-LD — added to a web page that states facts about an entity in a form search engines and AI systems can parse.
- Citation (in AI answers)
- A source an AI assistant references or links when it gives an answer. Being cited is a primary way a company earns visibility and trust in AI answers.
- Hallucination
- When an AI system states something false or unsupported as if it were fact — including inventing companies, details, or sources.
- Share of voice (AI)
- How often a company appears, relative to its competitors, across a set of AI answers for its category.
- Prompt
- The question or instruction a person gives an AI assistant. Small changes in wording can change which companies appear in the answer.
- Grounding
- When an AI system bases its answer on specific retrieved sources rather than only its trained memory. Grounded answers are likelier to cite real, checkable pages.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- A technique where an AI system fetches relevant documents and uses them to compose its answer. It is part of why current, well-structured web content can influence what an assistant says.
- Knowledge graph
- A structured map of entities and their relationships that search and AI systems use to recognize who or what something is. Being a clear, distinct entity helps you be recognized.
- Zero-click
- When a person gets their answer directly from the assistant without visiting any website. Visibility then depends on being in the answer itself, not on the click.
- Source authority
- How much weight an assistant gives a source based on its credibility. Authoritative third-party sources tend to influence answers more than self-published marketing.