Every term in AI search

20 terms in language you can use without looking anything else up. Where a term is contested, or a vendor invented it, we say so.

AI crawlerAn AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company to fetch web pages for training, indexing, or answering a live question.Read the definition
AI OverviewsAI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries shown above the traditional results for some searches.Read the definition
AI visibilityAI visibility is how often, and how prominently, a brand is named by AI assistants when people ask questions in its category.Read the definition
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)Answer Engine Optimization is another name for optimising to be named inside AI-generated answers. In practice it is used interchangeably with GEO.Read the definition
CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.Read the definition
Confidence bandA confidence band is the range around a measured score that reflects how much of the number is sampling noise rather than signal.Read the definition
EntityAn entity is a thing an engine models as a distinct object in the world, such as a specific company, product or person, as opposed to a string of text.Read the definition
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting a brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers, in the way SEO aimed to get a page ranked in a list of links.Read the definition
GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler. It reads pages to train and ground OpenAI's models, including ChatGPT.Read the definition
GroundingGrounding is when a model answers using documents retrieved at the time of the question, rather than only from what it absorbed during training.Read the definition
llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed convention for a markdown file at a site's root that tells an AI assistant what the site is and which pages matter.Read the definition
Model driftModel drift is when an engine's answers change because the provider changed the model behind it, not because anything about your brand changed.Read the definition
Prompt basketA prompt basket is the fixed set of questions a visibility tool asks engines on your behalf in order to measure how often you are named.Read the definition
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Retrieval-augmented generation is the technique of retrieving relevant documents and giving them to a model as context before it answers.Read the definition
robots.txtrobots.txt is a file at a site's root that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may fetch. It is a request, not an enforcement mechanism.Read the definition
sameAssameAs is a schema.org property listing other URLs that represent the same entity, such as a company's LinkedIn, GitHub or Crunchbase profiles.Read the definition
Sampling varianceSampling variance is the run-to-run variation you get from asking a language model the same question more than once.Read the definition
Share of voiceShare of voice is the proportion of AI answers in a category that name your brand, relative to the competitors named alongside you.Read the definition
Structured dataStructured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page and its subject are.Read the definition
Zero-click searchA zero-click search is one where the user gets what they needed from the results page or an assistant's answer and never visits a website.Read the definition