Glossary of AI reputation and AI search terms
The terms of this field are recent and used loosely. These are the definitions this site works with. Where a definition rests on a source, the entry says whose it is, and the page it points to gives the link.
This glossary defines the terms used across the site, in the sense in which the site uses them. Each entry gives a definition in one or two sentences and, where a page treats the subject, points to it. Several of these terms have no settled definition in the profession; an entry here is a working definition, not a standard.
Disciplines
AI reputation
What AI systems say about a person or an organization when asked, and the sources those answers are drawn from. See what AI reputation is.
AI reputation management
The work of keeping what AI systems say about a person or an organization accurate and well evidenced, by acting on narrative, entity, evidence and sources. It does not edit generated answers, which no one can do.
AI visibility
The extent to which a person or an organization appears, is described accurately and is cited in answers produced by AI systems. See AI visibility.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
The practice of making a page discoverable and competitive in search results.
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
The practice of structuring content so that a search engine or an AI assistant can extract a clear, self-contained answer from it. See answer engine optimization.
Generative engine optimization (GEO)
The practice of improving how often and how accurately content, and the entity behind it, is used and cited in answers written by generative systems. The term was introduced in a research paper published at KDD 2024. See generative engine optimization.
Entity optimization
The work of making a person, an organization or a product unambiguous to search engines and AI systems. Also called entity SEO. See entity optimization.
Online reputation management (ORM)
Work on what people find when they search for a name: results, reviews, profiles and social content. Compared with AI reputation management in this comparison.
Executive reputation management
The discipline of keeping the public record of a leader accurate, consistent and well evidenced. See executive reputation.
Brand authority
The degree to which a brand is trusted as a source on its subject, as shown by evidence and by independent confirmation. Distinct from awareness. See brand authority.
Entities and structured data
Entity
A thing a system can identify and distinguish from every other: a person, an organization, a product, a place. A keyword is a string; an entity is what the string refers to.
Entity confusion
The attribution to one entity of facts that belong to another, or the splitting of one entity into several. See confused with someone else.
Reference version
The single statement of an entity's facts, held by the entity, with which every other profile and page is aligned.
Knowledge graph
A database of entities, facts about them and relationships between them. Google describes its own as a database of billions of facts about people, places and things. See knowledge graph strategy.
Knowledge panel
The box Google may display for a search about an entity. Google states that panels are generated automatically, and that the entity or its representative can claim one and suggest changes.
Structured data
In Google's words, a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. See structured data for entities.
Schema.org
The shared vocabulary of types and properties, such as Person and Organization, which Google says most Search structured data uses.
JSON-LD
A JSON-based format for structured data. It is one of the three formats Google supports, and the one it recommends in most cases as the easiest to implement and maintain.
sameAs
A schema.org property defined as the URL of a reference web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. It links an entity described on one page to the same entity described elsewhere.
Sources and citations
Source
Any page or record from which a search engine or an AI system can take information about an entity.
Citation
A source that an AI-generated answer names or links to. A source can be used without being cited. See a source used and a source cited.
Owned source
A source the entity controls: its site, its official biography, its company pages.
Managed source
A profile or listing the entity fills in within a platform's format, such as a professional or directory profile.
Commercial source
A page that exists because someone paid for it: a paid placement, a sponsored profile, a reposted press release. It shows that a statement was made, and little about whether it is confirmed.
Independent source
A source the entity does not control and did not pay for: a register, a reference work, editorial coverage.
Corroboration
The confirmation of a claim by a source other than the one that made it. A claim repeated only by its author is not corroborated.
Source authority
The weight a source carries in what search engines and AI systems say about a subject. The sources cited on this site do not explain how that weight is assigned. See source and citation authority.
E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google says its systems try to reward. Google states that E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor and that trust is the most important of the four. See what Google says about trust.
Engines and access
Generative engine
A system that answers a query by synthesizing information from several sources and writing a response with a language model. The definition is paraphrased from the paper which introduced the term GEO.
AI Overviews
A Google Search feature that shows a generated answer with supporting links. See Google AI Overviews.
AI Mode
A Google Search feature for generated answers with follow-up questions. See Google AI Mode.
Query fan-out
Google's name for a technique in which AI Overviews and AI Mode may issue multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to develop a response. Third parties also use the term for the searches other assistants run.
Answer engine
A search engine or an assistant that returns a response and not a list of results.
Featured snippet
A search result in which Google shows the descriptive snippet first. Google states that a page cannot be marked as one; its systems decide.
Crawler
A program that fetches pages for a search engine or an AI provider. Providers publish the names of theirs and what each is used for. See Platforms.
User agent
The name under which a crawler identifies itself, and by which a robots.txt rule addresses it.
robots.txt
The file in which a site tells crawlers what they may fetch. Rules are set per crawler, which is why blocking one does not block another.
llms.txt
A proposed convention for presenting a site's content to language models. Google states that no AI text file is needed to appear in its AI features.
Measurement
Prompt
The question put to an AI system. In measurement, a prompt is fixed word for word.
Prompt family
A group of prompts that ask the same kind of question: identity, category, comparison, use case.
Prompt set
The fixed, versioned list of prompts used for a measurement. See the prompt library.
Run
One execution of one prompt in one engine, recorded with its conditions. Because answers vary, a prompt is run more than once.
Control
An organization with well-established facts, included in a prompt set to check the engine and the conditions.
Mention
The naming of an entity in the text of an answer, whether or not a source is cited for it.
Baseline
The first dated record of what search engines and AI systems say about an entity, against which later readings are compared.
Presence
The share of runs, across a prompt set, in which an entity is named.
Accuracy
Whether the facts an answer states about an entity match its reference version.
Consistency
Whether a description holds across engines, languages and runs. It does not say which version is right.
AI share of voice
Of all brand mentions in AI answers to a defined set of category prompts, the proportion that go to one brand among those tracked. See AI share of voice.
Position-adjusted word count
A research metric from the GEO paper: the share of an answer's words tied to a source, weighted by how early they appear.
AI search intelligence
The measurement of how an entity appears in AI answers: presence, accuracy, sources cited and others named. See AI search intelligence.
How these definitions are maintained
A definition changes when the source it rests on changes, or when usage on this site changes. Changes are dated in the change log. The rules under which measurements are made and published are in the methodology, and both belong to Research. The framework in which these terms are used is The Authority Architecture System.
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