Glossary
The vocabulary of AI visibility is young and inconsistent across the industry. These are the definitions AppearIn AI uses, in the sense they're used throughout these docs.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Structuring content so answer engines can understand it and select it as a direct, reliable answer. See What is GEO & AEO?
- AI crawlers
- Bots like GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot that crawl the web for AI training and retrieval. Unlike Googlebot, most can't execute JavaScript, so server-side rendering matters.
- AI engine
- An AI assistant that generates answers. AppearIn AI currently tracks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews. See AI engines we track.
- AI visibility
- How present, trusted, and accurately framed your brand is inside AI-generated answers. See AI visibility.
- Answer capsule
- A concise 15–80 word summary placed immediately after a heading. A high-impact GEO pattern, it gives AI engines a clean, quotable block to extract.
- Brand profile
- The structured set of confirmed facts about your brand, including name variations, features, markets, and pricing, that AppearIn AI uses to interpret answers.
- Citation
- A reference where an AI engine links to a specific page as the source of part of its answer. See mentions, citations & sources.
- Citation worthiness
- The quality of containing specific, attributable information, statistics, expert quotes, original data, that makes an AI engine more likely to cite your page over a competitor's.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, Google's quality-rater framework, increasingly used by AI engines to decide which sources to trust.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Optimizing content so generative engines cite your site in their answers. See What is GEO & AEO?
- Hallucination flag
- An alert raised when an AI engine states something false about your brand. See hallucination flags.
- Leaderboard
- A ranking of your brand against the direct brands found in the selected AI answers. See Share of Voice.
- llms.txt
- A proposed standard: a markdown file at /llms.txt giving AI engines a token-efficient index of your most important pages. Think robots.txt, but for LLMs.
- Mention
- Your brand being named in the text of an answer. Repeating the name in one answer still counts once for visibility metrics. See mentions, citations & sources.
- Mention Rate
- The share of successful answers in the selected prompt-set period that name your brand. It is separate from Share of Voice, which measures your average share within answers that name qualifying brands.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- An open protocol that lets AI agents discover and call your APIs directly. An MCP server makes your platform a first-class citizen in the agent ecosystem.
- Sentiment Score
- A single −100 to +100 reading of how favorably AI engines describe your brand: the share of positive mentions minus the share of negative ones, across all rated mentions. Neutral mentions count as passive, dampening the score toward zero without pushing it negative. Higher is better. See sentiment.
- OpenAPI / Swagger
- A specification format for describing REST APIs. An OpenAPI spec lets AI agents auto-generate integration code for your platform.
- AI engine breakdown
- Any metric shown separately for each AI engine rather than averaged, since AI engines often disagree. See AI engines we track.
- Top Placement
- How often your brand appears near the top of an answer when mentioned.
- Prompt
- A question sent to AI engines on your behalf, ideally phrased the way a real customer would ask it.
- Prompt library
- The project's pool of candidate prompts. It can hold more candidates than the plan-capped set that actually runs, including on Free.
- Prompt set
- The versioned selection that defines the population for set-scoped metrics. Free runs the first 30 selected prompts once; Plus runs up to 80 weekly; Pro runs up to 200 weekly. See how we collect data.
- Schema markup (JSON-LD)
- Structured data embedded in your HTML that tells AI engines what a page is about, article type, author, dates, products, FAQs, making it easier to extract and attribute.
- Sentiment
- How favorably an answer describes your brand, positive, neutral, or negative. See sentiment.
- Sentiment driver
- A recurring theme (pricing, support, integrations) that an AI engine attaches to your brand, explaining why sentiment moves.
- Server-side rendering (SSR)
- Rendering HTML on the server before sending it to the browser. Critical for GEO because most AI crawlers can't run client-side JavaScript, content that's rendered only on the client is invisible to them.
- Source
- Any page an AI engine drew on for an answer, yours or not, the ecosystem that shapes what AI says about your category. See mentions, citations & sources.
- Visibility metrics
- The metric set AppearIn AI uses to measure AI visibility: Share of Voice, mention rate, citation rate, sentiment, sources, and AI engine trends. See AI visibility.
- Zero-click
- When an AI answer satisfies the user without any click to a website. If you're not in the answer, there's no link left to earn.