AI visibility glossary
Plain-language definitions for AI brand visibility, citation tracking, and answer-engine measurement.
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AI crawler
An AI crawler is a web crawler operated by an AI company, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, that collects training data or real-time grounding for AI-generated answers.
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AI Overview
AI Overview is the AI-generated summary that appears at the top of a Google search results page, replacing or preceding the traditional ranked links.
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AI search
AI search is the category of search experience where an AI model writes a direct answer to the user, with sources cited inline or in a sidebar, instead of returning ten ranked links.
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AI visibility
AI visibility is the measurable share of AI-generated answers in which a brand appears as a recommended option, a cited source, or a named comparison.
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Answer engine
An answer engine is an AI system that synthesises a direct answer to a user query, typically grounded by retrieved sources, instead of returning a ranked list of links.
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Brand monitoring
Brand monitoring is the continuous tracking of mentions, sentiment, and visibility for a named brand across owned media, earned media, social, and, increasingly, AI-generated answers.
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Citation
A citation is an explicit, linked reference inside an AI-generated answer pointing to a specific source URL, distinct from an unlinked brand mention.
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Mention
A mention is any textual reference to a brand inside an AI-generated answer, regardless of whether it is accompanied by a source link.
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Prompt
A prompt is the natural-language input a user types or speaks into an AI engine, the question or instruction that triggers a generated answer.
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Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis classifies how positively, neutrally, or negatively a brand is described inside an AI-generated answer or other piece of text.
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Share of model
Share of model is the percentage of relevant AI-generated answers across a defined prompt set in which a brand is named, cited, or recommended.
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Share of voice
Share of voice is the proportion of category-level conversation, across search, social, AI answers, or media, that a brand owns relative to named competitors.