The AI search glossary
Every term you'll meet in AI search and brand visibility — defined in plain English, two sentences or less.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
The practice of making your business the answer AI platforms give when customers ask questions. Focuses on citations, structured data, entity clarity and answer-shaped content.
AI Overview
The AI-generated summary Google shows above traditional results for many queries. It cites a handful of sources — being one of them is the new position one.
AI crawler
A bot that reads web pages to feed AI systems — like GPTBot (OpenAI), Google-Extended or PerplexityBot. Blocking them in robots.txt removes you from those platforms' knowledge.
Answer engine
Any system that responds to a question with a direct answer instead of a list of links — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, voice assistants, AI Overviews.
Citation
A reference to your business inside an AI-generated answer — by name, link or quote. Citation share is AEO's equivalent of rankings.
Entity
A thing AI can identify and reason about — a business, person, place or product. Your business is an entity; AEO's first job is making sure machines recognise it unambiguously.
Entity consistency
Every public source agreeing on your name, category, location and offer. Inconsistency makes AI hedge or skip you.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
Optimising to be cited inside longer AI-generated content like research summaries and buying guides. Rewards quotable data and clear sourcing; overlaps heavily with AEO.
Grounding
When an AI runs a live web search and bases its answer on what it finds, rather than memory alone. Grounded answers can change quickly — which means visibility work pays off quickly too.
Hallucination
When AI states something false with confidence — like the wrong services or address for your business. Usually caused by thin or conflicting public data, and usually fixable.
Knowledge graph
A structured database of entities and their relationships that search engines and AI draw on for facts. Getting your business represented correctly in knowledge graphs is core visibility work.
LLM (Large Language Model)
The AI technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude — trained on web text to answer questions in natural language. What it learned about your brand determines its default answer.
NAP
Name, Address, Phone — the trio that must match across every listing and profile. Stale NAP data quietly disqualifies you from local AI answers.
Prompt
What a user types or says to an AI. Customers phrase prompts as needs ("who can fix X near me") — your content should answer needs, not just keywords.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
The technique of fetching relevant documents first, then generating an answer from them. It's why ranking in search still matters: retrieved pages become cited pages.
Schema markup
Code (JSON-LD) added to pages that states facts in a machine-readable format — your organisation, services, FAQs, reviews. Machines quote facts more confidently than prose.
Structured data
Any machine-readable format for facts about your business: schema markup, business profiles, review data feeds. The layer AI trusts most.
Visibility Score
Brand Visibility's single measure of how findable, understood and recommended your business is across search engines and AI platforms — the number our Visibility Intelligence Report™ tracks.
Zero-click search
A search answered entirely on the results page — no website visit. AI Overviews accelerate this: brands win by being named in the answer, not just linked.