Salience Strategy
AI visibility glossary
27 terms
A
- AEO
- Answer engine optimization. Work that gets a company named or cited when a person asks a question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI answers.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written answer Google shows above the regular results for some searches, with links to the pages it drew on.
- AI referrer visit
- A website visit where the referrer is an AI assistant, for example chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. It counts clicks only; a buyer who reads the answer and types the address shows up as direct.
- AI visibility
- How often a company is named or cited in AI answers to the questions its buyers ask.
- Alternatives page
- A page that lists the alternatives to one named competitor, with price and the main difference for each.
B
- Best-of list
- A page that ranks the vendors in one category. AI answers to "best X" questions often cite these lists.
- Booking-form source field
- A question on the call booking form that asks where the buyer found the company. It is how a call is attributed to Google or an AI assistant.
- Buyer question
- A question a buyer asks when choosing a vendor, for example "best cold email agency for SaaS". We track 30 per client.
C
- Citation
- A link to a source page shown next to an AI answer.
- Comparison page
- A page that sets two vendors side by side on price, contract and scope. Also called a vs page.
- Convert
- The fourth stage: the buyer clicks through and books a call.
- Cost page
- A page that answers what a product or service category costs, with published prices from named vendors.
D
- Directory listing
- A company profile on a third-party directory such as Crunchbase or Clutch, with name, category, price and website.
- Dream query
- A short, high-volume buyer question for a whole category, for example "AI visibility agency".
G
- GEO
- Generative engine optimization. Another name for AEO; the term comes from a 2023 research paper of the same name.
I
- IndexNow
- A protocol for telling Bing and other search engines that a URL is new or changed, so it is crawled sooner.
L
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at the root of a site that lists its main pages for language models.
- Long-tail query
- A specific buyer question with low search volume, for example "GEO agency with month to month pricing". A new page can rank for one quickly.
M
- Mention
- A company named in the text of an AI answer or a third-party page, with or without a link.
Q
- Qualified sales call
- A booked call with a company that fits what the seller sells. Our report counts those where the buyer named Google or an AI assistant as the source.
R
- Recall
- The first of our four stages: what an engine names from its training data, before it searches.
- Retrieve
- The second stage: the pages an engine finds and reads when it runs a web search for the question.
- Review site
- A platform where customers rate vendors, such as G2, Capterra, Clutch or Trustpilot.
S
- Salience
- How often a company gets named when a buyer asks a buying question.
- Schema markup
- Structured data in a page's HTML, such as Organization, FAQPage or Offer, that states facts in a format machines read directly.
- Statistics page
- A page of numbers from a company's own data, written so that other sites and AI answers can cite one figure at a time.
V
- Verify
- The third stage: the engine checks that a company is real through reviews, a published price and company facts.