Glossary
AI visibility, in plain words
The terms you meet when you work on how AI assistants recommend businesses.
- AI visibility
- How often and how AI assistants mention a brand for the questions it should be the answer to.
- Generative engine optimisation (GEO)
- Improving how content and brands appear in AI-generated answers: content AI can quote, technical access, and presence in the sources AI trusts.
- Answer engine optimisation (AEO)
- Another name for GEO, used mainly by marketers and analysts.
- Generative engine
- A system that writes an answer instead of returning a list of links, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Mode.
- AI Overviews
- AI-generated summaries shown above the normal results for some Google searches.
- AI Mode
- Google's conversational search tab, which answers in full and runs many related searches in the background.
- Query fan-out
- When an AI search breaks one question into many related searches and combines the results.
- Grounding
- Letting a model look things up (for example, with Google Search) before answering, instead of relying only on what it learned in training.
- Citation
- A source an AI answer links to or names. Citations show which pages influenced the answer.
- Mention rate
- The share of answers that name a brand for a question, e.g. 3 of 10 answers. Orbie reports it per engine, with a range.
- AI search analytics
- Studying how AI assistants answer the questions in a market (also called AI search analysis): which brands they name, which sources they cite and how they describe each brand.
- Brand perception
- How AI describes a business when asked about it directly: what it praises, what it criticises, and which facts it states.
- Sentiment
- Whether AI talks about a brand positively, neutrally or negatively. Orbie scores it from 0 to 100 per engine and tracks it over time.
- Engine split
- A brand recommended by one engine and missing from another, often strong in a model's memory but weak in live search, or the reverse.
- Intent
- What the person is trying to do with the question: compare, find the best for a need, find a cheaper alternative, discover new brands.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable information on a page (schema.org), such as product, price, rating or FAQ, that search and AI systems can read reliably.
- Product feed
- A structured file of products and their attributes sent to a platform. ChatGPT shopping and Google use feeds to show products.
- AI crawler
- The bot an AI company uses to read web pages, e.g. OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search. Blocking it can make a site invisible to that engine.
- llms.txt
- A proposed Markdown file that summarises a site for AI models. No major engine has confirmed using it.
- 95% interval
- The range a true rate likely falls in, given a small number of answers. 0 of 10 answers is consistent with up to about 28%.
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