AI visibility glossary

Terms

AI visibility

AI visibility is the share of AI answers to relevant, unbranded questions that name your brand, measured per engine, market and week.

Generative engine optimization (GEO)

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making a brand appear, correctly and favourably, in the answers of AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Answer engine optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is optimizing content so that answer engines, from featured snippets and voice assistants to AI chatbots, use it as the answer; today the term is mostly used as a synonym for GEO.

Share of voice (AI)

Share of voice in AI search is your brand's mentions as a share of all mentions of the tracked brands in AI answers.

Prompt

In AI visibility tracking, a prompt is one question you track, asked in one market and sent to every engine on a schedule, like “best current account for students”.

Fan-out query

A fan-out query is one of the web searches an AI engine runs in the background to answer a single prompt; one question can fan out into several searches.

Citation vs. source

A citation is a source an AI answer shows to the reader, as a link or chip; a source in the wider sense is any page the engine read to write the answer, shown or not.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows above the regular search results for some queries, with links to the pages they draw on.

Google AI Mode

Google AI Mode is a conversational search mode in Google Search that answers a question with an AI-written response and links, instead of a list of results.

Wilson confidence interval

The Wilson confidence interval is a range for a percentage measured on a sample; for AI visibility it says where the true share of answers naming a brand likely lies, given how many answers were counted.

How to measure AI visibility →