The AI visibility glossary
Plain-language definitions for the terms that come up when contractors ask how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI decide who to recommend. Every claim names its source, and where nothing has been measured, we say so.
52 terms defined
- Agentic CommerceAgentic commerce is buying that happens inside an AI conversation, where the assistant finds the product or service, compares options, and completes the purchase or booking for the user, as with ChatGPT's Instant Checkout or Thumbtack bookings in ChatGPT.
- Aggregator (directory site)An aggregator is a third-party directory or review site such as Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack, Healthgrades, or Avvo that collects listings and reviews for many businesses in a category, and AI engines frequently cite them when recommending local businesses.
- AI AgentAn AI agent is an AI system that doesn't just answer a question but takes actions on the user's behalf, such as browsing websites, comparing options, booking an appointment, or completing a purchase, working through multiple steps toward a goal.
- AI CrawlerAn AI crawler is an automated bot such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended that fetches web pages so an AI company can train its models or retrieve current information to answer user questions.
- AI OverviewsAI Overviews is Google's AI-generated summary that appears above the organic results for many searches, answering the query directly and citing a handful of sources instead of showing ten ranked links.
- AI Referral TrafficAI referral traffic is the visitors who arrive at your website by clicking a link inside an AI answer from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, or Claude, as distinct from visitors who came from search results, social media, or ads.
- AI SearchAI search is any search experience where an AI model reads sources and writes a direct answer to your question, as in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot, instead of returning a ranked list of links.
- AI VisibilityAI visibility is how consistently a business gets named when AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answer a customer's buying question, measured across repeated prompts and multiple engines rather than a single check.
- AI-Readiness AuditAn AI-readiness audit is a check of a website that tests whether AI crawlers can reach it, whether it serves HTTPS, whether facts like pricing, hours, and service area appear in plain text, and whether basic structured data is present.
- Answer EngineAn answer engine is an AI system, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews, or Copilot, that responds to a question with a direct written answer naming a small number of options instead of a page of ranked links.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews can extract a direct answer from it and attribute that answer to your business.
- Answer ShareAnswer share is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of questions in which your business appears at all, counted once per answer, unlike share of voice, which is your percentage of all business mentions across those answers.
- Brand Mention (AI answer)In an AI answer, a brand mention is any instance where the engine names your business in its response, with or without a link, distinct from a citation, which is a source the engine used and may not be yours.
- Citation (AI answer)In an AI answer, a citation is a source the engine references or links to while generating its response, and the number of sources cited per answer varies widely by engine, from about 2.5 for Copilot up to about 7.7 for Google AI Overviews.
- Cited SourceA cited source is a specific web page or domain, such as a Yelp listing, a Reddit thread, or a business's own service page, that an AI engine references as the basis for its answer, showing where it learned it.
- ClaudeBotClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler, identified by the user-agent string ClaudeBot, that fetches public web pages for Claude's AI models, and site owners can allow or block it through a rule in robots.txt like any other named bot.
- Competitor Benchmark (AI answers)A competitor benchmark in AI answers is a side-by-side comparison of how often each business in a market gets named for the same buying questions on the same engines, revealing who holds the slots you don't and why.
- Content Gap (AI answers)In AI visibility, a content gap is a buying question that AI engines answer by naming your competitors but not you, usually because your website has no page stating the specific service, price, location, or detail the engine needed.
- Conversational SearchConversational search is looking for information by asking an AI system full questions in natural language and refining with follow-ups in the same thread, as in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode, rather than typing short keywords.
- CrawlabilityCrawlability is how easily automated bots from search engines and AI companies can discover, fetch, and read the pages on a website, determined by robots.txt rules, server responses, HTTPS, sitemaps, and whether content is visible without running JavaScript.
- E-E-A-TE-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the four qualities Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines ask human reviewers to assess when judging whether a page and its author are credible.
- EntityAn entity is a distinct, uniquely identifiable thing such as a business, person, or place that search engines and AI systems recognize as a single node with attributes, so Smith Plumbing in Dayton is one entity however it's written online.
- FAQ Schema (FAQPage)FAQ schema is schema.org's FAQPage structured data type, a block of JSON-LD that labels the questions and answers on a page so search engines can read each pair explicitly, which helps indexing but hasn't been shown to earn AI citations.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping content so AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity cite or recommend it when they generate an answer, rather than optimizing for a ranked list of links.
- Google AI ModeGoogle AI Mode is a conversational search experience inside Google Search that answers a question with a full AI-generated response, supports follow-up questions, and pulls its sources from many related searches rather than the single query you typed.
- Google Business Profile (GBP)Google Business Profile is the free listing a business manages in Google that holds its name, address, hours, phone, categories, photos, and reviews, driving Google Maps and local 3-pack results and serving as a heavily cited source in AI answers.
- Google-ExtendedGoogle-Extended is a robots.txt token that lets a site owner control whether Google uses their content for Gemini model training and grounding, without affecting how Googlebot crawls the site for Search or whether pages appear in AI Overviews.
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting publicly available content to train its AI models, identified by the user-agent string GPTBot and controllable through robots.txt, and it is separate from OAI-SearchBot, which powers ChatGPT's search answers.
- GroundingGrounding is when an AI model bases its answer on live, retrieved information, such as a web search result, instead of relying only on what it learned during training, which is meant to make answers more current and accurate.
- Hallucination (AI)A hallucination is when an AI system states something as fact that is false, unsupported by any source, or not actually said by the source it appears to cite, presented with the same confidence as a correct answer.
- IndexNowIndexNow is an open protocol, created by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a page is added, updated, or removed, so the change is crawled within hours.
- Knowledge GraphA knowledge graph is a structured database of entities, such as businesses, people, and places, and the relationships between them, which search engines like Google use to answer factual questions directly and to understand what a business is.
- Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO)Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) is the practice of making a business's content easy for a large language model to retrieve, understand, and repeat accurately, so that ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity names the business when answering a customer's question.
- llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed text file, similar in format to robots.txt, that a site can publish to summarize its content for AI models, but as of mid-2026 no major AI system reads or uses it, so it has no effect on AI visibility.
- Local Pack (Google 3-Pack)The local pack, or Google 3-pack, is the block of three map-pinned business listings Google shows for searches with local intent, drawn from Google Business Profile data and ranked by relevance, distance, and prominence rather than by an AI-generated answer.
- LocalBusiness SchemaLocalBusiness schema is the schema.org structured data type, with subtypes like Dentist, Plumber, Restaurant, and LegalService, that marks up a business's name, address, phone, hours, and service area in JSON-LD so search engines can index those facts without inferring them.
- Mention Rate (Visibility Rate)Mention rate, also called visibility rate, is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of buying questions that name your business, calculated per engine over repeated runs, so it measures how reliably an engine recommends you.
- OAI-SearchBotOAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler that indexes web pages for ChatGPT's search features, so a site that blocks it can't be fetched or linked when ChatGPT searches the web, and it is separate from GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler.
- PerplexityBotPerplexityBot is the web crawler Perplexity uses to index pages for its AI answer engine, identified by the user-agent PerplexityBot and controllable through robots.txt, and it feeds an engine that runs a fresh web search for every question.
- Position in AnswerPosition in answer is the rank at which an AI engine names your business within a single response, where position 1 means you were named first, and it matters because answers hold only a few slots.
- Prompt TrackingPrompt tracking is the practice of running a fixed set of buying questions against AI engines on a schedule, recording which businesses each answer names and which sources it cites, so visibility becomes a per-engine trend.
- Prompt VolumePrompt volume is the number of times a buying question gets asked across an AI engine in a measurement, and it needs to be high enough, repeated over time and across engines, to produce a share-of-voice reading you can trust.
- Query Fan-OutQuery fan-out is the technique Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use to split one search into several related sub-queries and build one answer from the combined results, so cited pages often don't rank for the original query.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the technique where an AI model first searches for relevant documents, such as web pages or listings, and then writes its answer from what it retrieved, instead of relying only on what it memorized during training.
- Review SignalsReview signals are the count, rating, recency, and written content of customer reviews on Google, Yelp, and industry directories that search engines and AI answer engines read as evidence of a business's quality when deciding how to recommend it.
- robots.txt for AI Crawlersrobots.txt for AI crawlers means using the robots.txt file at your site's root to allow or block named AI bots such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, deciding which AI systems may read your pages for training or live answers.
- Sentiment Score (AI)An AI sentiment score is a 0 to 100 rating of how warmly an AI engine describes your business when it mentions you, where high scores reflect language like highly rated and low scores reflect hedges or complaints.
- Share of Voice (AI)AI share of voice is the percentage of tracked AI answers that name your business instead of a competitor's, measured per engine and across repeated prompts, since a single AI answer isn't a reliable sample.
- Source AnalysisSource analysis is the practice of collecting every page and domain AI engines cite when answering a set of buying questions, then ranking them per engine to find which directories, review sites, and websites drive who gets recommended.
- Structured Data (schema.org / JSON-LD)Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org vocabulary written as JSON-LD, that labels facts like a business's name, address, hours, and services so search engines can index them precisely, though no study shows it causes AI citations.
- Topical AuthorityTopical authority is the depth and consistency with which a website covers one subject, shown by many specific, accurate pages on related questions, so search engines and AI systems treat the site as a reliable source for the whole topic.
- Zero-Click SearchA zero-click search is a query where the user gets what they need from the results page itself, such as an AI Overview, map pack, or knowledge panel, and never visits a website, earning a business visibility but no visit.
