Contact Get AI Visibility Audit →
AI Discovery/ Discovery Library/ Glossary

The AI Discovery
Glossary.

Fifty-six terms in the canonical AI Discovery vocabulary. Definitions, why each matters, and where each sits in The Standard™.

All terms · alphabetical

AI Citation
A footnoted or inline reference to a source that an AI system uses in producing an answer. Citations are typically visib…
AI Crawler
An automated bot that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI system. Common examples: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Go…
AI Discoverability
Synonym for AI Visibility. The measurable state of being discoverable inside AI-generated answers.…
AI Discovery
The discipline of being found and recommended inside AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Go…
AI Discovery Audit™
The seven-day audit producing your AI Discovery Score™, an eight-signal breakdown, and a 90-day roadmap. From $800.…
AI Discovery Score™
A 0–1000 score across eight signals that measures how discoverable a firm is inside AI systems. Five bands: E (0–400), D…
AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated answer that appears above the organic results for many queries. Operated on the Gemini model famil…
AI Visibility
The measurable presence of a firm inside AI-generated answers to high-intent prompts. AI Visibility is the outcome metri…
AI Visibility Check
A free directional read of how a firm appears in AI answers. Lighter than the full Audit, useful as an intake screen.…
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Optimising content to be lifted directly into AI-generated answers as a quotable passage. AEO is the answer-shaping comp…
Answer Shape
The property of content being structured to be liftable as a direct answer to a question. The eighth of the eight signal…
Author Markup
Schema.org structured data identifying the named author of content. Materially strengthens E-E-A-T signals.…
Authority & Authorship
The named, credentialled human authority publicly attached to a firm. The second of the eight signals.…
Bing Chat
The original name for Microsoft's AI-powered search experience, now rebranded as Copilot.…
Brand Mention
Any reference to a brand in third-party content, with or without a hyperlink. AI systems weight linked mentions and unli…
ChatGPT
OpenAI's consumer LLM product, currently running on the GPT family. Web-enabled mode uses Bing for live retrieval.…
Citation Density
The frequency and provenance of editorial citations of a firm across publishers that AI systems weight as authoritative.…
Citation Source
A publisher whose articles AI systems cite when answering questions. Citation Sources are weighted by perceived authorit…
Claude
Anthropic's family of large language models. Claude Sonnet, Opus and Haiku are the production tiers. Claude's web-enable…
ClaudeBot
Anthropic's web crawler, used to train and retrieve content for Claude.…
Content Coverage
The breadth and depth of owned content mapped to the questions buyers ask AI. The sixth of the eight signals.…
Conversational Search
Search via natural-language dialogue rather than keyword query. The dominant search mode inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplex…
Copilot
Microsoft's AI assistant family. Microsoft Copilot Search uses GPT-4 plus the Bing index.…
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google's quality framework, materially overlapping with the A…
Entity Disambiguation
Distinguishing one entity from others with similar names. Critical when multiple firms share a name across markets.…
Entity Integrity
The state of being a clean, disambiguated, recognised entity across the web. Entity Integrity is the first of the eight …
FAQ Schema
Schema.org markup for question-and-answer content. Helps AI systems lift FAQ content into answers directly.…
Featured Snippet
Google's pre-AI-Overviews answer box that quoted a passage from a top-ranked page. Largely superseded by AI Overviews bu…
Gemini
Google's flagship multimodal LLM family, operating Google AI Overviews and the Gemini consumer product.…
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
The practice of optimising content and entity surface for generative AI systems that produce synthesised answers rather …
Google Search Console
Google's webmaster tool for diagnosing indexing, schema, and ranking issues.…
Googlebot / Google-Extended
Googlebot is Google's primary web crawler. Google-Extended is the opt-out signal for Gemini training but does not affect…
GPTBot
OpenAI's web crawler, used to train and retrieve content for ChatGPT.…
Helpful Content
Google's quality signal targeting content that exists primarily to serve users rather than to rank. The Helpful Content …
Knowledge Graph
A structured representation of entities and the relationships between them. Google's Knowledge Graph and Microsoft's Kno…
Knowledge Panel
The structured profile Google shows on the right-hand side of search for known entities. Powered by the Knowledge Graph.…
LLM Optimisation (LLMO)
An umbrella term used by some practitioners for AI Discovery / GEO. We treat it as a synonym for GEO.…
llms.txt
An emerging standard for telling AI systems what content on your site to use and how. Analogous to robots.txt but for LL…
Local AI Discovery
AI Discovery for businesses where locality matters — multi-location, service-area, or city-specific. Local AI Discovery …
Local Resolution
The AI system's ability to resolve a firm to a specific city, suburb, or service radius. The fourth of the eight signals…
LocalBusiness Schema
Schema.org markup describing a local business — geo coordinates, opening hours, service area, price range.…
NAP Consistency
Consistency of Name, Address, Phone across all directory listings, websites, and structured data. A foundational signal …
Organisation Schema
Schema.org markup describing the organisation behind a site — name, logo, address, founder, contact.…
Passage-Level Citability
The property of a page being structured so AI systems can lift a clean, citable passage. Short, self-contained, answer-s…
Perplexity
An AI search engine that emphasises citation transparency — every claim is footnoted to a live URL.…
PerplexityBot
Perplexity's web crawler, used for retrieval into Perplexity answers.…
RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
The technique of grounding LLM responses in retrieved content from a live index. RAG is the mechanism by which web-enabl…
Review Schema
Schema.org markup for individual reviews and aggregate ratings. Critical for Trust Signal Quality.…
robots.txt
A text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers what to access. Critical for AI Discovery because it controls w…
Schema Markup
Structured data in JSON-LD format that tells search engines and AI systems what your page is about. Schema.org is the ca…
Search Generative Experience (SGE)
The original name for Google's AI-search experiment, since rebranded to AI Overviews and graduated from beta.…
Semantic Search
Search that matches on meaning rather than keyword. All major AI systems now use semantic search as the primary retrieva…
Sentiment Signal
The aggregate emotional valence of public references to a brand. AI systems use sentiment in determining whether to reco…
Technical Discoverability
The base technical layer — crawlability, schema, recency, performance — that everything else sits on. The seventh of the…
The Authority Premium
The disproportionate AI Discovery yield earned by firms whose authority surface (editorial citations, named principals w…
The Eight Discovery Signals
Entity Integrity · Authority & Authorship · Citation Density · Local Resolution · Trust Signal Quality · Content Coverag…
The Index™
The quarterly benchmark of AI Discovery Scores across published verticals, published by AI Discovery Pty Ltd.…
The Standard™
The canonical specification document for AI Discovery, published by AI Discovery Pty Ltd. Specifies how the Eight Signal…
Trust Signal
Any verifiable indicator of trustworthiness — reviews, accreditations, complaint records, third-party verification. Weig…
Trust Signal Quality
The provenance-weighted measure of trustworthiness signals — not just volume but source quality. The fifth of the eight …
Vector Embeddings
Numerical representations of content that allow semantic similarity search. Vector embeddings underpin most modern retri…
Wikidata Entity
An entry in Wikidata, the structured-data sibling of Wikipedia. A clean Wikidata entity is a strong AI Discovery signal …
Zero-Click Search
A search where the user gets their answer from the result page itself without clicking through. AI Overviews have dramat…

Find out where you stand in 7 days.

The AI Discovery Audit™ delivers a 0–1000 score, an eight-signal breakdown, and a 90-day roadmap. From $800.

Get Your AI Visibility Audit →