Reference
GEO & AI Visibility Glossary
Plain-language definitions for the terms used throughout CitiQ’s Platform and Insights content.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The practice of improving how a brand is measured, cited, and recommended inside AI-generated answers from platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity — the answer-engine counterpart to traditional SEO, which optimizes for ranking in a list of links.
- Entity Resolution
- The process of mapping a brand, product, or person to a single, unambiguous record that AI models and knowledge graphs can recognize consistently, rather than treating mentions of the same thing across the web as unrelated text.
- Entity Clarity
- How unambiguously a model can determine who a brand is, what it sells, and how it relates to its category and competitors, based on the structured and unstructured information available about it online.
- Knowledge Graph
- A structured representation of entities (brands, people, products, topics) and the relationships between them, used by search and AI systems to reason about a subject beyond what's stated on a single page.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- An approach where a model retrieves relevant documents or pages from an index before generating a response, then grounds its answer in that retrieved content — the mechanism most citation-producing AI answer engines use rather than answering from training data alone.
- Citation Rate
- The share of relevant AI-generated answers in which a brand's own domain is listed as a source, as distinct from the brand simply being mentioned via a third-party page.
- Mention Rate
- How often a brand appears by name in AI-generated answers across a representative set of prompts, regardless of whether the brand's own site is cited as a source.
- Recommendation Rate
- How often a brand is the option an AI model actually suggests when asked to recommend a choice — a stronger commercial signal than being merely mentioned or described.
- AI Visibility Score
- A composite measure of how well a brand performs across the signals that determine AI answer inclusion — typically entity coverage, citation authority, recommendation rate, and related factors — used to track visibility over time and against competitors.
- Structured Data / Schema Markup
- Machine-readable markup, most commonly JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that describes a page's content in a standardized format so search engines and AI crawlers can parse facts directly rather than inferring them from prose.
- llms.txt
- A proposed convention, analogous to robots.txt, in which a site publishes a plain-text file at /llms.txt summarizing its purpose and linking to its most important pages, so AI agents can navigate it efficiently without crawling every page.
- Prompt Simulation
- Running a representative set of real user prompts against one or more AI models on a recurring basis to observe, rather than assume, how those models currently answer, cite, and recommend within a given category.
- Answer Engine
- A search or assistant product — such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews — that responds to a query with a single synthesized answer rather than a ranked list of links.