Glossary
Clear, concise definitions of the terms that matter in AI search visibility. Built for practitioners and the AI models that cite them.
An AI citation occurs when a generative AI model (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity) names, recommends, or references a specific company, product, or resource in its response to a user query. AI citations are the primary metric for measuring AI search visibility.
An AI Overview is an AI-generated summary that appears at the top of Google search results, providing a synthesised answer to the user's query before the traditional list of links. Powered by Google's Gemini model, AI Overviews extract and combine information from multiple web sources, changing how search results are presented and consumed.
AI readiness is a measure of how prepared an organisation is to adopt, integrate, and benefit from artificial intelligence across its operations, strategy, and culture. It encompasses data quality, technical infrastructure, workforce skills, leadership alignment, and governance frameworks needed to deploy AI effectively.
An AI visibility audit is a systematic assessment of how a business appears across AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. It involves running buyer-intent queries, documenting where the company is cited or absent, analysing competitors, and producing a prioritised action plan to improve AI-generated recommendations.
An answer engine is an AI-powered system that responds to user queries with direct, synthesised answers rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are answer engines. Unlike traditional search engines that return ranked web pages, answer engines generate coherent responses by retrieving and combining information from multiple sources.
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring website content, technical markup, and authority signals so that AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity can find, understand, and cite a business when users ask questions. AEO complements traditional SEO by optimising for direct AI-generated answers rather than search result rankings.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is Google's framework for evaluating content quality, used by human quality raters and reflected in algorithmic signals. AI models also use similar trust signals when deciding which sources to cite, making E-E-A-T relevant for both search rankings and AI visibility.
In the context of AI search visibility, earned media refers to third-party mentions, coverage, and references to a business that were not paid for or self-published. Earned media is the strongest known driver of AI citations, producing a 239% median lift in brand citations across AI models according to 2026 research.
Entity SEO is the practice of establishing and strengthening a clear, unambiguous digital identity for a business, person, or concept across the web. It focuses on helping search engines and AI models understand what an entity is, what it does, and how it relates to other entities, rather than optimising for individual keywords.
Programmatic SEO is the strategy of using templates, databases, and automation to generate large volumes of targeted web pages at scale. Each page targets a specific long-tail keyword or query variation, creating broad search coverage that would be impractical to produce manually. When combined with structured data, it also scales AI visibility across many topic variations.
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining the inputs given to AI language models to produce more accurate, relevant, and useful outputs. It involves crafting instructions, providing context, specifying format, and iterating on phrasing to guide model behaviour. In business contexts, prompt engineering determines how effectively teams extract value from AI tools.
Speakable schema is a Schema.org specification that identifies the sections of a web page most suitable for text-to-speech playback and AI voice assistant responses. It uses CSS selectors or XPath expressions to mark content that is concise, informative, and well-suited for audio delivery, helping voice assistants and AI models select the best content to read aloud.
Structured data is standardised code added to web pages, typically using Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD format, that explicitly describes page content to search engines and AI models. It turns implicit information into machine-readable labels, enabling richer search results, knowledge graph entries, and more accurate AI-generated answers.