AI Visibility Glossary
Grounding
Why it matters
Grounded answers are where citations happen. If your content is what the engine grounds on, your brand gets named and linked in the response buyers read.
How to measure it
Look at whether AI answers about your category include cited sources, and whether your domain is among them.
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Related terms
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is the practice of earning citations and mentions inside generative AI responses. It focuses on becoming a source the model trusts and pulls from when it composes an answer, rather than ranking in a traditional index.
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.
RAG, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation, is a technique where an AI model retrieves relevant documents and uses them to generate a grounded answer. It's the mechanism behind most answer engines that cite live sources.
An answer engine is an AI system that responds to a query with a direct, synthesized answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot are answer engines that pull from web sources to compose responses.