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AI visibility glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms behind AI visibility: how AI engines choose which businesses to name, how that is measured, and what you can change on your own site. Each entry answers in its first sentence and names its sources.

  • AEO

    Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of making a business easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and name when people ask them questions.

  • AI crawlers

    AI crawlers are the bots AI companies use to fetch web pages, such as OpenAI’s GPTBot, Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot; Google-Extended is a robots.txt token controlling use of content for Google’s AI models.

  • AI Mode

    Google AI Mode is a conversational search experience in Google Search that answers longer questions and follow-ups with an AI-written response and links to sources.

  • AI Overviews

    Google AI Overviews are AI-written summaries shown at the top of some Google Search results, with links to the web pages the summary drew on.

  • AI visibility score

    An AI visibility score is a single number, usually from 0 to 100, that sums up how often and how prominently a business is named in AI engines’ answers to the questions its customers ask.

  • Answer engine

    An answer engine is a search tool that replies to a question with a written answer, rather than a list of links.

  • Citation

    A citation is a source that an AI engine links to or names as the basis for its answer.

  • Entity

    In search and AI, an entity is a uniquely identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that systems recognise and connect to facts, often through a knowledge graph.

  • GEO

    Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of shaping content so generative AI systems mention or cite it in their answers; in day-to-day use it means much the same as AEO.

  • llms.txt

    llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives AI models a short Markdown summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.

  • Prompt tracking

    Prompt tracking means asking AI engines the same set of customer questions on a schedule and recording each answer, so you can see whether, where and how often your business appears over time.

  • Share of voice

    In AI visibility, share of voice is the portion of all brand mentions in AI answers, across a set of customer questions, that belong to you rather than your competitors.

  • Structured data

    Structured data is machine-readable code, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that states facts about a page or business, such as its name, address, products, opening hours or FAQs.

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