The terms behind visibility in AI answers; each one in a paragraph, without jargon.
Answer Engine Optimization. Structuring content so that it gets quoted by engines that answer a question directly (voice assistants, featured snippets, AI answers).
Open tool →The crawler programs that language model companies use to read web pages – GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others. If one of them can't get into your site, that engine can't learn about you.
Open tool →The source link shown beneath or within an AI answer. Being cited is clear proof that the answer rests on your page, and it's the only kind of AI visibility that brings clicks.
Open tool →Google's quality evaluation framework – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Not a ranking factor but four answers to the question "why should we believe this source"; AI models ask the same question.
Open tool →Generative Engine Optimization. Everything you do so that your business appears accurately and positively in the answers of engines that generate replies, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Open tool →A Markdown-formatted summary file at the root of a site that tells language models "this is what the site is about, these are the important pages". The introducing, not blocking, sibling of robots.txt.
Open tool →The question asked of the model (prompt), and the list of questions used to measure visibility, defined once and frozen (prompt set). Measurements are only comparable if the set stays fixed.
Open tool →The model producing its answer not only from memory but from documents it retrieves at that moment (web search, a database). Perplexity works this way entirely, ChatGPT and Gemini often do; that's why your page needs to be quotable.
Open tool →The three states an engine can be in regarding your business. Recommends – it names you when the need is asked about. Recognizes – it knows your name but doesn't name you for the need. Doesn't mention – it doesn't know you at all, or can't find you.
Open tool →A plain-text file at the root of a site that tells bots which addresses they may visit. Also the most common place where AI crawlers get blocked without anyone noticing.
Open tool →A shared vocabulary (Schema.org) that labels the information on a page as "this is a business, this is its name, this is its phone number", and the most common way of writing it into the page (JSON-LD). It lets the machine read instead of guess.
Open tool →The percentage of all AI answers to a given set of questions in which your business appears. The answer to a single question is an anecdote; the share itself is a measurement.
Open tool →Measure where your site stands in AI answers with 19 free checks; score and roadmap in minutes.