Glossary

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. Making your product appear in the answers AI assistants give, rather than in a list of blue links. The AI equivalent of SEO.

GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. The same idea under a different name. The two terms are used interchangeably.

Engine. One AI assistant we poll: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Llama, Mistral or DeepSeek. See AI engines and models.

Model. The specific version behind an engine. Pro and above can pick it; other plans use the engine’s default.

Prompt. A question we ask the engines on your behalf, once a day, every day. See Prompts.

Run. One prompt sent to one engine at one moment, and the answer that came back. Everything else is aggregated from runs.

Mention. Your brand appearing in an answer.

Position. Where in the answer you were mentioned. Position 1 is the first brand named. Lower is better.

Visibility Score. Share of runs where you appear in the top 10.

Detection Rate. Share of runs where you appear anywhere in the answer.

Top 3 Visibility. Share of runs where you appear in the top 3, which is roughly the part of an answer people actually read.

Share of Voice. Your mentions as a fraction of all brand mentions in your category.

Sentiment. Whether the engines describe you positively, neutrally or negatively.

Citation. A source URL an engine returned with its answer. Captured from Perplexity and grounded Gemini. See Citations.

Grounding. When an engine searches the live web before answering, instead of answering from training data alone. Grounded answers produce citations.

Citation gap. Sources that cite your competitors but never cite you. The most actionable list in the product.

Brand Score. A single 0 to 100 number combining visibility, position, sentiment and citations, always over a fixed 7-day window.

Crawl, poll. The daily job that sends every active prompt to every tracked engine. See Crawl schedule.

Batch. One poll run, grouped so you can see how it went per prompt and per engine.

llms.txt. A file at the root of a site that tells AI crawlers what the site contains and where the important content is, in the spirit of robots.txt. Checked by Site Scan.

Structured data, JSON-LD. Machine-readable facts embedded in a page, describing what it is about. Helps engines quote you accurately.

Answerability. How easy it is to lift a quotable answer straight off your page: a direct answer near the top, clear headings, concrete facts.

Related: How AskAiRank works, Metrics explained.