The AI visibility glossary

AI visibility is how often AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the other answer engines — name a brand when buyers ask questions in its category, and whether they cite the brand’s own pages as sources. It is the AI-answer counterpart of ranking in search, measured from real answers.

An LLM rank tracker runs a fixed set of prompts through AI assistants on a schedule and records whether a brand is named, in what position, and which sources each answer cites — so you can track rank inside AI answers over time, the way you track keyword rankings.

An AI visibility score is a single number that summarizes how visible a brand is in AI answers, built from measured inputs: how often answers name the brand, its average position when named, and how often its own pages are cited. A score you can trust publishes its formula.

Prompt monitoring is running a fixed set of buyer questions through AI assistants on a repeating schedule and storing every answer, so a brand can see when it starts or stops being named, how its rank moves, and which sources the engines cite — with evidence for each change.

AI share of voice is the percentage of brand mentions in a tracked set of AI answers that belong to one brand rather than its competitors. If engines name brands 1,000 times across your prompts and 342 of those mentions are yours, your AI share of voice is 34.2%.

A mention is when an AI answer names a brand in its text; a citation is when the answer lists the brand’s own domain among its sources. They are independent signals: an answer can name you without citing you, cite you without naming you, do both, or neither.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the rest — name and cite a brand in their answers. Where SEO competes for position on a page of links, GEO competes for a place inside the answer itself.

An answer engine is an AI system that responds to a question with one synthesized answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini with AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok, Claude, DeepSeek, and Meta AI all work this way: brands appear inside the prose, or not at all.

AI citations are the sources an AI assistant lists alongside its answer — the pages it retrieved and leaned on while writing. For a brand, citations reveal which domains feed the answers in its category, and whether any of its own pages are among them.

ChatGPT ranking factors are the signals that make ChatGPT more likely to name and recommend a brand: presence in its training data, retrievable pages that answer buyer questions directly, consistent brand descriptions across the web, and third-party comparisons and lists that already recommend the brand.