The AI search glossary
43 terms that come up when you measure whether AI answers mention your brand — written to be looked up, not read end to end. Every entry states what is documented, what is measurable, and where measurement stops working.
AI search fundamentals
4 terms AI Mode AI Mode is a Google Search experience that a user opens to ask a question, get an AI-generated answer with links to supporting pages, and keep going… 9 sections · 5 FAQ · 4 figures AI Overview An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google shows above its classic search results, with links to the pages it drew on. 7 sections · 4 FAQ · 3 figures Answer Engine An Answer Engine is a search system built to answer a question directly with a generated response, rather than returning a ranked list of links for… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures Zero-Click Search A Zero-Click Search is a search that fully satisfies the user's need on the results page itself, through a direct answer, featured snippet or… 6 sections · 4 FAQ
AI architecture
6 terms Context window The context window is everything a language model can look at while producing one answer, including the answer it is producing. 4 sections · 4 FAQ · 2 figures Grounding Grounding is the practice of anchoring an AI-generated answer to retrieved, verifiable external sources at the moment of the response, instead of… 7 sections · 4 FAQ Knowledge Cutoff A Knowledge Cutoff is the date after which an AI model's training data stops, so the model has no built-in awareness of events or information… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Knowledge Graph The Knowledge Graph is Google's model of real-world entities and the relationships between them, used to distinguish things that share a name and to… 5 sections · 4 FAQ Query fan-out Query fan-out is the name Google uses for a technique that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use: a question is split into subtopics, several related… 7 sections · 5 FAQ · 4 figures Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, is a technique where an AI model retrieves relevant passages from an external source at the moment of a query… 6 sections · 4 FAQ
Measurement and metrics
9 terms AI Visibility AI Visibility is how consistently a brand shows up in AI-generated answers for the specific buyer contexts that matter to it, not a fixed score for a… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 2 figures Brand Mention A Brand Mention is any instance where an AI-generated answer names your brand, by company name or product name, regardless of whether a link,… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures Citation Rate Citation Rate is the share of AI-generated answers, across a set of tracked prompts, where your website is cited as a source with a link or… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures Hallucination Rate Hallucination Rate, in an AI-visibility context, is how often an AI assistant states false or fabricated information about a specific brand, such as… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Prompt Volume Prompt Volume is the number of distinct, real buyer questions or prompts that exist for a given topic or category, used as the base a mention rate,… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Sentiment in AI Answers Sentiment in AI Answers is a reading of whether a brand mention inside an AI-generated answer comes across as positive, neutral or negative, based on… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Share of Voice in AI Share of Voice in AI is the percentage of AI-generated answers, across assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, that mention your… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures Source Attribution Source Attribution is whether an AI-generated answer correctly credits the page it actually drew its information from, as opposed to citing an… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Visibility Score A Visibility Score is a single composite number, usually 0 to 100, that combines several underlying AI-visibility metrics, typically mention rate,… 6 sections · 4 FAQ
Technical access
17 terms AI opt-out (Google Search) An AI opt-out for Google Search is the Search Console setting, rolled out to all websites on 31 August 2026, that excludes a site from AI Overviews,… 5 sections · 5 FAQ · 2 figures Bytespider Bytespider is the web crawler operated by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, identified by the user-agent token Bytespider and used to gather web… 5 sections · 4 FAQ ClaudeBot ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler, identified by the user-agent token ClaudeBot, used to gather web content that can support Claude's training and… 6 sections · 4 FAQ data-nosnippet data-nosnippet is an HTML attribute that marks a part of a page as unusable for a search snippet. 8 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures Google-Extended Google-Extended is a standalone product token in robots.txt that lets a publisher control whether content Google's crawlers gather from their site… 5 sections · 4 FAQ GPTBot GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler used to gather content for training its AI models. 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures IndexNow IndexNow is a protocol that lets a website push a ping to participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of… 5 sections · 4 FAQ llms.txt llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file that gives AI agents a short overview of a site or a section of it, with links to the pages worth reading. 9 sections · 5 FAQ · 4 figures max-image-preview max-image-preview:[setting] sets the maximum size of an image preview for a page in search results, with three accepted values: none, standard and… 5 sections · 4 FAQ max-snippet max-snippet:[number] tells Google to use at most that many characters as the text snippet for a page, and limits how much of the content may be used… 5 sections · 4 FAQ nosnippet nosnippet is a robots rule that tells Google not to show a text snippet or video preview for a page, and not to use that page's content as a direct… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures OAI-SearchBot OAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler used to surface websites in the search features of ChatGPT. 7 sections · 5 FAQ · 3 figures Passage Ranking Passage Ranking is when a search or AI system evaluates and ranks individual sections of a page, not just the page as a whole, so a specific,… 6 sections · 4 FAQ PerplexityBot PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to surface and link websites in its search results. 7 sections · 5 FAQ · 2 figures robots.txt for AI Crawlers robots.txt for AI Crawlers means using the standard robots.txt file at a site's root to allow or block specific AI bots, such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot,… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures Structured Data for LLMs Structured Data for LLMs is markup, typically JSON-LD following Schema.org vocabulary, added to a page so search engines and AI systems can identify… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 1 figures X-Robots-Tag X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP response header that carries the same indexing directives as the robots meta tag, such as noindex, nofollow and nosnippet,… 5 sections · 4 FAQ
Strategy and optimization
3 terms Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of making content more likely to be used and cited in the answers that AI systems generate, rather… 6 sections · 4 FAQ · 2 figures LLM SEO LLM SEO is the practice of trying to make a website more likely to be used and cited in the answers that large language models produce. 6 sections · 4 FAQ Topical authority Topical authority is an SEO industry term for the idea that covering a subject area comprehensively earns a site preferential treatment for queries… 5 sections · 4 FAQ
Practice
4 terms Content Chunking Content Chunking is the practice of structuring a page into self-contained sections, each answering one specific question clearly enough to be… 6 sections · 4 FAQ E-E-A-T in an AI Context E-E-A-T in an AI Context is the question of whether Google's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness framework, built for human… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Entity SEO Entity SEO is the practice of structuring content, markup, and mentions so search engines and AI systems recognize a brand, product, or concept as… 6 sections · 4 FAQ Prompt Engineering for Brands Prompt Engineering for Brands is the practice of writing and testing the exact prompts used to check how a brand appears in AI assistant answers,… 6 sections · 4 FAQ
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