Core Concepts

AI Visibility measures how often your brand is mentioned, recommended, or referenced when users ask AI models questions relevant to your products, services, or industry.

Also: AI presence, LLM visibility

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing digital content to be included and accurately represented in AI-generated responses.

Also: Generative Engine Optimization, AI SEO

Zero-click searches occur when AI provides a complete answer within the interface, eliminating the need for users to visit external websites.

Recommendation share measures your brand's portion of AI recommendations within a specific product category or topic area.

Also: Share of recommendation, AI share of voice

AI hallucinations occur when language models generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information.

In AI-generated responses, a citation occurs when the model explicitly references or links to your content as a source.

Also: Source attribution, AI reference

AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) are Google's AI-powered summaries that appear above traditional search results.

Also: SGE, Search Generative Experience, Google AI Overviews

Answer engines are AI systems designed to provide direct, synthesized answers to user questions rather than lists of links.

Also: AI assistant, Conversational AI

A prompt is the input text a user provides to an AI model to get a response.

Also: Query, User question

Conversational search is a paradigm shift in information discovery where users interact with AI systems through natural language dialogue rather than typing fragmented keywords into a search box.

AI-powered search is the umbrella term for any search experience where artificial intelligence synthesizes a direct answer for the user rather than simply returning a ranked list of links.

Also: AI Search, Intelligent Search

A large language model (LLM) is the AI system that powers modern answer engines like ChatGPT (GPT-4), Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Also: LLM

Grounding is the process by which AI models connect their generated responses to verifiable, real-world sources rather than relying solely on patterns learned during training.

AI content optimization is the practice of structuring, formatting, and enriching your digital content so that AI systems can easily extract, understand, and cite it when generating answers.

Conversational discoverability measures a brand's ability to surface naturally in AI-driven conversations and answer generation without the user specifically searching for that brand by name.