AI Visibility Glossary
Answer Engine
Why it matters
Answer engines compress the buyer journey: users get a recommendation without visiting ten sites. Whether your brand is in that answer determines whether you're even considered.
How to measure it
Query the major answer engines with your buyers' questions and record which brands and sources appear. A snapshot audit does this systematically across engines.
Measure your AI visibility
See how AI engines cite and recommend your brand, scored on eight signals across every major engine. Free.
Related terms
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing content and brand signals so AI answer engines surface and recommend you in their responses. Where SEO targets a ranked list of links, AEO targets being the answer itself.
AI visibility is how often and how prominently a brand appears in the answers generated by AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. A brand with high AI visibility is named, cited, and recommended when people ask AI for options in its category.
Share of voice in AI is the proportion of AI answers in your category where your brand is named, relative to competitors. It shows how much of the AI conversation you own versus how much your rivals capture.
Citation rate is how frequently AI engines cite a brand or its website as a source when answering questions in its category. A high citation rate means the engine repeatedly leans on your content to ground its answers.