AI search glossary
Short definitions of the terms used when talking about how AI assistants find and recommend businesses.
- API
- A business-facing connection to an AI service. AIRank uses these connections to send questions and save the answers. Results can differ from the assistant’s public app.
- Paid AI advertising
- Buying ad placements on AI services that offer them. Ad payments do not buy control over the assistant’s unpaid answers. Learn more
- AI visibility
- How often, and how accurately, AI assistants name a business when people ask questions it should be an answer to. For a local business, it is usually measured as the share of answers to customer questions that name it.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Work that makes a business or page easier for AI assistants to find, understand, trust and include in the answers they write. Also called AI SEO or answer engine optimization (AEO). Learn more
- Mention rate
- The percentage of AI answers to a set of questions that name a business. AIRank calculates it over discovery questions only, excluding lookups of the business’s own name.
- Confidence range
- A statistical range that describes uncertainty in the answers collected. AIRank uses a 95% Wilson interval. More answers can narrow the range, but repeated answers may be related; the range is not a prediction of every customer’s experience.
- Citation
- A link an AI assistant shows as a source for its answer. A citation is the assistant’s output, not independent proof that the fact is correct.
- Grounding
- When an AI model bases its answer on retrieved information, such as web search or map results, rather than only on what it learned in training.
- AI search crawler
- A bot that reads websites so an AI assistant can find and cite them in search answers, such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. Learn more
- AI training crawler
- A bot that collects public web content to train AI models, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or the Google-Extended control. Blocking one is separate from allowing search crawlers.
- NAP consistency
- Using an identical business Name, Address and Phone number on your website, Google Business Profile and directories, so search engines and AI treat them as one business.
- LocalBusiness schema
- Structured data in JSON-LD that describes a business’s name, address, phone, hours and service area in a machine-readable format. Learn more
- Google AI Overviews
- AI-written summaries shown at the top of some Google Search results. Google says the same Search eligibility rules apply and no special markup is required. Learn more
- Discovery question
- A question where a customer asks an assistant to choose businesses for them, such as “best electrician in Whitby” — as opposed to a lookup of a specific business.
- llms.txt
- A proposed text file summarizing a website for language models. Major assistants do not document using it to choose local businesses.