Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms you will meet, grouped by theme. Tap any term to read more.
AI visibility
- AI visibility How your company shows up when someone asks an AI model instead of using a search engine.
- AEO (answer engine optimisation) Getting your company picked up and cited by AI answer engines, the way SEO does for search results.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation) The market's other name for AI visibility work: getting surfaced and cited in AI-generated answers.
- SEO (search engine optimisation) Making your site rank in traditional search engines. The groundwork AI visibility builds on.
- Zero-click When people get their answer straight from a search or AI result without clicking through.
- AI Overviews AI-generated answers that appear above the usual search results.
Measurement & reporting
- Report A clear overview of where you appear, which competitors are mentioned and in which contexts.
- Competitor A company that AI models bring up in the same context as you.
- Context The topic area where you are compared. You can be visible in one and invisible in another.
- Magic link A secure sign-in link sent to your email, no password needed.
- Share of voice How much of the AI answers in your space mention you versus your competitors.
- Share of citation How often AI answers cite or name you as a source, compared with others in your space.
- Citation gap Topics where AI answers cite others but not you, the clear openings to become the cited source.
Technical AI signals
- AI visibility checklist What your site should have to be visible in AI answers, and what is missing today.
- AI crawler An automated reader that visits your site. Many do not run JavaScript, so they only see the page source.
- Structured data (JSON-LD) Checked in your AI report Machine-readable facts about your company so AI and search engines describe you correctly.
- llms.txt Checked in your AI report A short, AI-readable profile of your business: what you do and your key pages.
- E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) The signals of quality and credibility that AI and search engines lean on to decide whether to trust and cite you.
- Entity Checked in your AI report Being recognised as a clearly defined thing, your company, that AI can identify with confidence.
- Answer-first Leading with the direct answer in plain language a model can lift and cite.
- Static vs JS-rendered content Content in the page source is readable by AI crawlers; content that only appears after scripts run may be invisible.
Models & language models
- LLM (large language model) The kind of AI behind assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
- Frontier model One of the most capable, current AI models from a leading provider.
- Knowledge cutoff Roughly how current an AI model's world knowledge is.
- Training data cutoff The point where the data a model was trained on ends.
- Context window How much text an AI model can consider at once, measured in tokens.
- Token(s) The small chunks of text, roughly word fragments, that AI models read and generate.