Glossary
Short, evergreen definitions of the terms that come up when tracking a brand against competitors across AI answers, communities, news and social.
A
Advertising Value Equivalency
Advertising value equivalency, usually shortened to AVE, is an older PR measurement method that estimates the cost of buying the same amount…
Agentic Search
Agentic search is AI search carried out by an autonomous agent that plans several steps, runs multiple queries, and sometimes takes an actio…
Agentic Search Optimization
Agentic search optimization is the practice of shaping a brand's content and data so an autonomous AI agent, one acting on a user's behalf t…
AI Citation
An AI citation is any instance of an AI answer engine naming, describing or linking to a brand when responding to a question, whether the en…
AI Crawlers
AI crawlers are bots operated by AI companies, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, that fetch pages across the web to train models …
AI Grounding
AI grounding is the step where an AI answer engine ties its generated response to specific outside sources, usually shown as citations or li…
AI Mode
AI Mode is Google's conversational search feature that answers a query directly inside Google Search with a generated response and follow-up…
AI Overview
An AI Overview is the AI-generated summary Google shows above the regular blue-link results for some search queries, pulling together an ans…
AI Search
AI search is the umbrella term for searching through a generative AI system, whether a chat engine, a browser's AI feature, or a search engi…
AI Search Engine Optimization
AI search engine optimization (AI SEO) is the general term for adjusting a brand's content so AI-powered search experiences surface and cite…
AI Search Visibility
AI search visibility is how often, and how favorably, a brand shows up when AI-powered search surfaces, such as AI Overviews, AI Mode or Per…
AI Share of Voice
AI share of voice is the portion of AI-generated answers, across a set of relevant buying questions, in which a brand gets mentioned compare…
AI Visibility
AI visibility is how often, how accurately and how favorably a brand shows up when someone asks an AI answer engine a question related to bu…
AI Visibility Score
An AI visibility score is a single composite number meant to summarize how visible a brand is across AI engines overall, usually combining h…
Answer Engine
An answer engine is a search or AI product built to give a direct, generated response to a question, such as Perplexity, ChatGPT's search fe…
Answer Engine Optimization
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is writing and structuring content so it can be lifted directly into a short answer, the kind a voice assis…
B
Brand Health Tracking
Brand health tracking is the regular practice of watching a set of signals together, typically mention volume, sentiment and share of voice,…
Brand Mention
A brand mention is any instance of a brand's name appearing in public content, such as a forum post, article, review or AI-generated answer,…
Brand Monitoring
Brand monitoring is the ongoing tracking of where and how a brand gets mentioned, across communities, news, blogs, social platforms and AI-g…
Brand Perception
Brand perception is how people actually describe and think about a brand, as distinct from how the brand describes itself in its own marketi…
Brand Reputation
Brand reputation is the overall impression a brand holds at a given time across everywhere it is discussed, reviews, communities, news, soci…
Brand Safety
Brand safety is the practice of keeping a brand's name, ads or content away from contexts that could damage its reputation, such as appearin…
Brand Sentiment
Brand sentiment is the overall positive, negative or neutral tone of how a brand is discussed across its mentions over a given period. It is…
Brand Sentiment Analysis
Brand sentiment analysis is the process of applying sentiment classification specifically to a brand's mentions, as opposed to sentiment ana…
Brand Tracking
Brand tracking is the ongoing, repeated measurement of how a brand is discussed, perceived and mentioned across sources like communities, ne…
Buzz Monitoring
Buzz monitoring is watching for a sudden spike in mentions of a brand or competitor, the kind that follows a launch, a viral post or a news …
C
ChatGPT Search
ChatGPT Search is the web-browsing feature built into ChatGPT that lets it look up current pages and cite them with links, rather than answe…
ChatGPT SEO
ChatGPT SEO is the practice of optimizing a brand's content and public presence specifically for how ChatGPT, including its search feature, …
Competitive Benchmarking
Competitive benchmarking is comparing a brand against named competitors on a consistent set of measures, such as mention volume, sentiment o…
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is the ongoing practice of gathering and organizing information about named competitors, such as their pricing, pos…
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is the ongoing practice of tracking what named competitors are doing and how they are discussed, across communities, new…
Consumer Intelligence
Consumer intelligence is insight about what customers and prospects actually think, want or complain about, gathered from how they talk in p…
Content Gap Analysis
Content gap analysis is the process of comparing what a brand has published against what its competitors cover, or against the questions buy…
Conversational Search
Conversational search is a back-and-forth search experience where a person asks a question, gets an answer, and asks a follow-up that the AI…
Coverage Report
A coverage report is a periodic summary of every piece of press, blog or review coverage a brand received over a set window, usually listing…
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the limited number of pages on a site that a crawler, whether a classic search bot or an AI company's bot, will actually fet…
Crisis Management
Crisis management, in a brand-monitoring context, is the process of noticing a sudden spike in negative mentions or a fast-spreading complai…
Customer Sentiment
Customer sentiment is the overall tone, positive, negative or neutral, of how customers talk about a brand across public channels such as re…
D
Deep Search
Deep search is a slower mode some AI products offer, such as Perplexity, where the engine runs many searches, reads many pages, and compiles…
Digital PR
Digital PR is public-relations work focused on getting a brand covered, quoted or named on other websites, such as news outlets, industry bl…
E
Earned Media
Earned media is coverage or mentions a brand receives without paying for placement or writing it itself, such as a journalist's article, a b…
Earned Media Value
Earned media value (EMV) is an estimate of what unpaid coverage, a press mention, a community post, a review, would have cost if a brand had…
G
Generative AI Search
Generative AI search is the category of search done through a generative AI chat interface, such as ChatGPT Search, Perplexity or an AI-nati…
Generative Engine Optimization
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping a brand's online presence so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini …
Generative Search Optimization
Generative search optimization is the practice of shaping a brand's content and presence so AI-generated search results, the kind that write…
GEO Audit
A GEO audit is a structured check of whether, and how, AI chat engines mention a brand when asked a relevant buying question, usually run ac…
L
LLM
An LLM (large language model) is the AI system behind products such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek that reads a q…
LLM SEO
LLM SEO is a common marketing term for the practice of shaping a brand's content and online presence so products built on large language mod…
LLM Visibility
LLM visibility is how often, and how accurately, a brand is named when someone asks a large language model chat engine, such as ChatGPT, Cla…
llms-full.txt
llms-full.txt is a proposed companion file to llms.txt that holds a site's full content in plain markdown, rather than just an index of link…
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file, placed at a website's root the same way robots.txt is, meant to give AI systems a short, curated lis…
Local Citations
Local citations are mentions of a business's name, address or other identifying details on other websites, such as directories or review sit…
M
Market Intelligence
Market intelligence is the ongoing collection and analysis of information about a market: competitor moves, customer opinion, news coverage …
Media Intelligence
Media intelligence is the practice of analyzing collected media coverage and mentions for patterns, such as competitor positioning, sentimen…
Media Kit
A media kit is a standing page or document a brand keeps ready for journalists, bloggers and partners, usually holding the company's boilerp…
Media List
A media list is a curated list of journalists, publications, podcasts or newsletters a PR or communications team maintains to pitch stories …
Media Monitoring
Media monitoring is tracking coverage of a brand, a competitor or a topic across news outlets, blogs and other published media as it comes o…
Message Pull-Through
Message pull-through is how much of a brand's intended messaging, the specific points pitched to a journalist or included in a press release…
P
Pay-Per-Crawl
Pay-per-crawl is an emerging access model where a publisher charges an AI company's crawler a fee each time it fetches a page, rather than s…
Perplexity
Perplexity is an AI answer engine that responds to a question with a short, sourced summary built from current web pages rather than a ranke…
PR Measurement
PR measurement is the practice of evaluating whether public relations work actually produced a result, looking past simple output counts, su…
PR Monitoring
PR monitoring is tracking whether a brand's own press and outreach efforts, such as a press release or a pitched story, actually result in c…
Press Clipping
A press clipping is a single piece of media coverage about a brand, originally a physical cutting from a newspaper and now any news article,…
Press Release Distribution
Press release distribution is the practice of sending a written announcement, a funding round, a product launch, a new hire, to news outlets…
Prompt Tracking
Prompt tracking is running a fixed list of buying questions, the kind a real prospect would ask an AI assistant, through AI engines on a reg…
Prompt Volume
Prompt volume is an estimate of how often a given question or prompt is asked across AI engines, the AI-answer equivalent of search volume f…
R
Real-Time Monitoring
Real-time monitoring is tracking brand and competitor mentions as they're published, rather than in a weekly batch, so a team learns about a…
Real-Time Search
Real-time search is search, including AI-powered search, that draws on current information rather than a fixed, older index. Some AI engines…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the technique behind many AI answers where the system first retrieves relevant documents or web page…
Review Management
Review management is the specific practice of requesting, monitoring and responding to customer reviews on the platforms buyers actually che…
Review Velocity
Review velocity is the rate at which new reviews come in for a brand over a given period, as distinct from the total review count or the ave…
robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain-text file at a site's root that tells automated crawlers, including search engine bots and the crawlers AI companies u…
S
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data, usually written as JSON-LD, added to a web page's code to label what a piece of content actually is (a pro…
Search Generative Experience
Search Generative Experience, usually shortened to SGE, was the earlier name for Google's AI-generated answer layer shown above regular sear…
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is classifying a piece of text, such as a forum post, review or news article, as positive, negative or neutral about a br…
Sentiment Score
A sentiment score is a numeric or categorical rating, such as positive, neutral or negative, assigned to a piece of text, like a mention, re…
Share of Market
Share of market is the portion of total demand in a category that goes to one company, usually measured as a percentage of unit sales or rev…
Share of Model
Share of model is how often a brand is mentioned by one specific AI model, such as ChatGPT or Claude, compared to its named competitors, as …
Share of Search
Share of search is the percentage of brand-name search interest in a category that belongs to one brand rather than its named competitors, t…
Share of Voice
Share of voice is the percentage of all mentions in a given set, such as a set of communities, news and blog coverage, or AI-engine answers,…
Social Listening
Social listening is the ongoing practice of tracking what people say about a brand, its competitors or a topic across public social platform…
Social Listening Tool
A social listening tool is software that collects and organizes mentions of a brand, product or competitor across social platforms, and in b…
Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring is tracking mentions of a brand, product or competitor across social platforms, usually filtered by keyword or accou…
Social Media Sentiment
Social media sentiment is the tone, positive, neutral or negative, of mentions specifically on social platforms, scored the same way as gene…
Social Share of Voice
Social share of voice is share of voice calculated specifically from mentions across social platforms and online communities, rather than fr…
Source Citation
A source citation is the specific page, review or article an AI answer engine points to as the basis for a claim it makes about a brand, the…
Speakable
Speakable is a structured-data markup from schema.org that flags specific sentences or sections of a page as suited for reading aloud by a v…