Glossary
AI search vocabulary, defined by how it is measured.
Most definitions in this category describe an ambition rather than a measurement. Each term below says what the thing is, how it is actually computed, and what it does not tell you. Where the honest answer is that no measured evidence supports a popular claim, it says that too.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)also AEO
- Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting a brand named, cited and recommended inside the answers AI assistants generate, rather than inside a ranked list of links. The unit of success is a share of answers, not a position.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)also GEO
- Generative engine optimization is, in practice, the same discipline as answer engine optimization. The two terms emerged separately and are now used interchangeably across the market, including in job titles and product categories.
- Named rate
- Named rate is the share of sampled AI answers that mention your brand at all, decided by exact word-boundary matching rather than by a model's judgment. It is the floor of the ladder: the prerequisite for everything above it, and by itself it says nothing about whether the answer endorsed you.
- Cited rate
- Cited rate is the share of sampled AI answers that link to one of your own domains as a source. It measures whether engines treat your site as evidence, which is a different outcome from whether they mention your name.
- Supported rate
- Supported rate is the share of sampled answers that both name your brand and cite one of your own domains in the same answer. It is the strongest presence rate because the mention and the evidence are anchored to each other.
- Share of voice in AI answersalso Share of answers, AI share of voice
- Share of voice in AI answers is the proportion of answers in a category that mention your brand rather than a rival. It is only meaningful when the denominator is stated, and across this tool category the denominator frequently is not stated.
- Wilson confidence interval
- A Wilson confidence interval is a range around a measured proportion that reflects how much the sample size limits certainty. It is the standard tool for small-sample rates, and it is why an honest AI visibility figure is reported as a band rather than a single number.
- AI crawleralso AI bot, LLM crawler
- An AI crawler is an automated fetcher operated by an AI company to collect web pages for training corpora, retrieval indexes, or live answer grounding. They identify themselves with their own user agents, and blocking one can remove your site from that engine's answers.
- Retrievability
- Retrievability is whether an AI engine can fetch your page and extract your claims as text. It sits upstream of every other AI visibility problem: a page that cannot be fetched or parsed cannot be cited, however good the content is.
- Citation target
- A citation target is a third-party page that AI engines already cite when answering questions in your category. It turns the vague instruction to build authority into a specific, addressable place to earn a mention.
- AI Overviews and AI Mode
- AI Overviews is the generated summary Google places above its classic results. AI Mode is Google's separate conversational search experience. They are different surfaces with different triggering behavior, and a brand can appear in one and not the other.
- Prompt trackingalso Buyer question tracking
- Prompt tracking is running a fixed set of buyer questions through AI engines repeatedly and recording what each answer says. It is the AI counterpart to rank tracking, with one structural difference: the output is a rate across many runs, never a position.
The rules these definitions come from are on our methodology page, including the tactics we refuse to build and why.