AI visibility glossary

The AI visibility glossary.

The language of getting found inside AI answers. Every term that matters for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, in plain English.

be the source AI cites ✍
AI crawler A bot that fetches web pages to feed AI systems, such as GPTBot or Google-Extended, distinct from the classic search crawler. AI Overviews Google's AI-generated summary at the top of some results, synthesized from multiple sources and shown above the links. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Answer Engine Optimization: structuring content so answer engines can pull a clear, direct answer from it and cite you.
Brand sentiment Whether AI answers describe your brand positively, neutrally or negatively when they mention it.
Citation share Your slice of the sources AI answers cite for a set of queries, the AI-era equivalent of ranking share. Content chunking Breaking content into clean, self-contained sections so AI systems can retrieve and quote the right passage. Context window The amount of text an AI model can consider at once, which limits how much it can read before answering. Conversational search Searching in natural, back-and-forth language, often as follow-up questions, the way you'd talk to an assistant.
Entity SEO Optimizing around entities, the people, places, products and concepts search engines recognize, rather than just keywords.
Grounding Tying an AI's answer to real, retrieved sources so it is accurate and citable rather than guessed.
Hallucination When an AI model states something false or invented as if it were fact.
Knowledge graph The database of entities and their relationships that search and AI engines use to understand the world and answer factually.
Large language model (LLM) The AI trained on huge text data that powers tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. llms.txt A proposed text file that tells AI crawlers which content on your site to use, similar in spirit to robots.txt.
Multimodal search Search that understands more than text, including images, voice and video, in a single query.
Passage retrieval Pulling the single most relevant passage from a page, rather than the whole page, to answer a query. Prompt The instruction or question a user gives an AI model to get a response. Prompt engineering Crafting prompts to steer an AI model toward better, more reliable outputs.
Query fan-out When an engine expands one query into several related searches, gathers results for each, and synthesizes a combined answer.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) An AI method that fetches relevant sources at answer time and generates a response grounded in them.
Semantic search Search that matches meaning and intent rather than exact keywords, using the relationships between concepts. Share of model How often, and how favourably, AI models mention your brand for your key topics, compared to competitors.
Unlinked brand mention A reference to your brand without a hyperlink, which still builds recognition and helps AI engines associate you with a topic.
Vector embedding A numeric representation of text that lets AI compare meaning, so similar ideas sit close together in vector space.
Zero-click search A search that ends on the results page, because the answer is shown there and the user never clicks through.

Know the terms. Want the content?

We turn these concepts into blogs, comparison pages and lead magnets that actually rank, in search and in AI answers.

Book a 30-min call →