The AI Search & GEO Glossary

Ad trigger rate is the share of tracked prompts whose AI answers surface a paid placement.

The ads shelf is the carousel of paid product cards that appears inside an AI answer, and the creative is the content of each card: its image, title, and body copy.

Commerce carried out by AI agents that research, recommend and increasingly transact on a user's behalf.

The bots, like GPTBot and Google-Extended, that fetch web content for AI models, and which you choose to allow or block.

AI readiness is a measure of how prepared your content is to be found, understood, and cited by AI models when they answer questions about your category.

Finding information by asking AI assistants that answer directly, instead of searching a list of links.

How present and prominent your brand is across AI assistants and AI search engines.

An answer engine is a search system that returns a single synthesized answer to a question, rather than a page of links for you to evaluate yourself.

Average Position measures where your brand tends to land inside an AI answer: named first and led with, or mentioned last and buried.

The tone an AI model uses when describing your brand, benchmarked against the category.

A brand mention is any reference to your brand inside an AI-generated answer: named, abbreviated, or referred to by a hero product.

Brand voice alignment measures how closely an AI model's description of your brand matches the positioning you actually intend to project.

Prompts that explicitly name a brand, used to see how AI models describe that specific brand.

Buyer intent is the stage of the purchase journey that a prompt reveals, from early awareness to active decision.

ChatGPT Ads are paid placements that appear inside ChatGPT's answers: sponsored products and brands surfaced alongside the organic response.

The sources an AI model links to or references to support the answer it generates.

Prompts that pit brands against each other, like "X vs Y", showing how AI models frame you at high-stakes decision moments.

Competitive Benchmarking is the practice of measuring your AI search metrics against a pool of competitors rather than in isolation.

Finding the topics where competitors are cited in AI answers and you are not, turning each gap into a content brief.

The disintermediated web is the shift from websites as destinations people visit to data sources that feed the machines.

Domain authority in AI search is how much an answer engine trusts your website as a source worth retrieving, quoting, and citing.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the framework Google popularized for judging content quality.

Making your brand a clear, consistent entity that AI models recognize and describe accurately.

The practice of improving how your brand appears in AI-generated answers across engines like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

A review of how well a page or site can be found, parsed, and cited by AI answer engines, and where to improve its answer-readiness.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) share DNA but optimize for different outputs.

Google AI Mode is a fully generative search experience where you have a conversation with the search engine instead of scanning a list of links.

Google AI Overviews are the generated answer block that appears at the top of many Google search results, above the familiar list of links.

The process by which an AI model bases its answer on external sources or live web results rather than only its training data.

Grounding Source Prominence, or GSP, is a measure of which domains and URLs get cited when AI engines answer questions in your category.

An AI hallucination is when a model states something false with complete confidence, presenting invented or incorrect information as if it were fact.

A knowledge graph is a structured map of entities, things like companies, people, products, and places, and the relationships between them.

The type of AI system, like GPT or Gemini, that generates the answers behind AI search.

An LLM Visibility Index is a single composite score that summarizes how visible your brand is across AI search engines.

A proposed file, similar in spirit to robots.txt, that points AI models to a site’s most important content.

Earning presence in the third-party sources AI models trust, so answers cite you beyond your own domain.

The distinction between earning a mention in AI answers and paying for placement, as ads arrive in AI search.

Structured product data that feeds AI agents and shopping surfaces so models can find, understand, and recommend your products.

Prominence is a measure of how visible and central a brand is inside AI-generated answers.

The natural-language input a user gives an AI model to get an answer, and the core unit of measurement in AI Search and GEO.

Organizing tracked prompts by product, vertical, and intent so AI visibility metrics show exactly where your narrative breaks.

Prompt volume is the demand or frequency behind a tracked prompt: how often real people actually ask that question, or ones like it, of AI engines.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation: grounding a model’s answer in sources fetched at query time rather than memory alone.

Structured data that makes your pages machine-readable, helping AI models understand your entities and ground answers accurately.

A Sentiment Score is an index, typically on a 0 to 100 scale, of how positively AI models describe your brand, calibrated against the category baseline.

The percentage of tracked AI answers in your category in which your brand appears at all.

How often your brand is mentioned across AI answers relative to your competitors.

How often and how prominently your products appear in the shortlists AI agents recommend, the agentic shelf.

Share of Voice (AI) measures your brand's overall presence versus competitors across AI-generated answers.

The difference between what an AI model memorized during training and what it retrieves live at answer time.

Buying-intent prompts like "best X to buy", where AI answers shape purchases and agentic commerce begins.

Emerging protocols that standardize how AI agents discover products, transact, and pass payment and context when they shop.

Category prompts that name no brand, like "best CRM for startups", used to measure whether AI answers discover you at all.

An emerging way to expose a site’s data and actions to AI agents, so they can do more than just read your pages.