Glossary: AI visibility monitoring
Short explanations of the terms you will meet in CiteLyzer, in the report and at other vendors. No jargon, and no assumption that you do SEO for a living. If a term seems obvious yet keeps being confused, you will probably find it below.
- What is the difference between a mention and a citation?
- What is mention sentiment in AI answers?
- What is Share of Voice in AI visibility?
- What is AI visibility?
- What is a prompt in visibility monitoring?
- What is a scan?
- What is the difference between an AI engine and an AI model?
- What does presence mean?
- What is average position?
- What do GEO and AEO stand for?
What is the difference between a mention and a citation?
A mention is your brand's name appearing in the text of an AI answer, with no link. A citation is a link to your domain that the AI gives as a source. A mention builds recognition, a citation can bring traffic to your site. Many tools call both of these citations; we count them separately.
We keep them apart because they lead to very different conclusions. A brand named in dozens of answers but never cited is recognised, yet nobody clicks through to its site. The reverse also happens: a site quoted as a source without the company name being said adds traffic but builds no memory. You see both numbers separately, and the decision which one to work on stays with you.
What is mention sentiment in AI answers?
Sentiment describes HOW an AI chat presents your brand once it names it. We distinguish three levels: recommended with conviction, mentioned without a recommendation (neutrally, in passing, or with reservations), and advised against. We also check separately whether an answer actively recommends the brand or merely mentions it, because being on the list is not the same as being endorsed.
Two brands can have identical presence in the answers and completely different situations: one the AI puts first and encourages the reader to pick, the other it names with a warning. We only classify answers where the brand actually appears, because an answer without a mention has no attitude towards the brand and cannot honestly be scored. The result is shown as a distribution, not a single number: how many answers recommend you, how many have reservations, how many advise against, and which group to work on first.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is a combined measure of how often and how prominently your brand appears in AI engines' answers to your customers' prompts. It is built from mentions, citations, presence and average position. Think of it as the equivalent of search visibility, except measured inside the answers rather than on a list of links.
The name covers the same ground as GEO and AEO, but without the acronyms: it is about whether an AI names and links your company when a potential customer asks. Because customers meet AI answers in chats and in Google alike, AI visibility spans both kinds of surface rather than any single tool.
What is a prompt in visibility monitoring?
A prompt is the question your customer asks an AI chat, for example “which cleaning company would you recommend in Boston?”. In monitoring, the prompt plays the role a keyword played in SEO: the unit we measure results for. You pick the set of prompts, we ask them regularly and record the answers.
A good prompt set sounds like your customers’ sentences, not like phrases once typed into a search box. People write to a chat in full sentences, often with conditions: a budget, a city, an industry. The closer a prompt is to a real question, the more the result tells you about what your customer actually hears.
What is a scan?
A scan is one round of asking your set of prompts to the AI engines and recording what they answered. Each scan is a snapshot of a given day, and a series of scans becomes your trend over time. Your plan's cadence decides how often the scans run.
AI answers can differ even when the same question is asked twice, because the models are not deterministic. That is why a series of scans matters more than any single result. One day on which your brand did not appear means nothing by itself. Only the trend across weeks tells you which way things are going.
What is the difference between an AI engine and an AI model?
An AI model is the chat itself, for example ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. An AI engine is the broader term: it also covers the answer surfaces in search, meaning AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google, which are not chat models. We say “engine” when the set includes both.
The distinction is practical, because the two kinds behave differently. A customer comes to a chat with a question and stays in the conversation. An AI answer in Google appears above the regular results and often settles the matter before anyone clicks a link. We measure both, because your customer lands sometimes here, sometimes there.
What does presence mean?
Presence is the percentage of scans in which your brand appeared in the answer at all, regardless of position. It answers the simplest question: does AI know about me? A presence of 40% means your name came up in four answers out of ten, and stayed absent in six.
It is usually the first number worth looking at. Before you start working on where in the list you appear, check whether you appear at all. Low presence with a high average position means AI rarely talks about you, but speaks well of you when it does.
What is average position?
Average position is the place where your brand first appears in an answer, averaged over all the scans in which it appeared at all. It matters because a chat typically names three to five brands, and the customer most often stops at the first one.
Always read it together with presence, because it is calculated only from the answers you are in. A brand named once in a hundred scans, but first every time, will show an excellent average position and negligible presence. Average position on its own can be misleading.
What do GEO and AEO stand for?
GEO is Generative Engine Optimization and AEO is Answer Engine Optimization. In practice both mean the same thing as AI visibility: making sure AI engines mention and cite your company. You will meet the acronyms at agencies and in industry writing; in the product we stick to plain language.
The acronyms come from the SEO world, where they are useful because they name a service. To a business owner they say nothing, which is why we avoid them in the dashboard and in the report. If someone offers you a “GEO service”, they mean working on exactly what CiteLyzer measures.
See it on your own company
A customer asks AI about a company like yours. Are you in the answer?
These terms only start meaning something concrete on your own data. See which questions you appear on, who gets recommended instead of you, and what you can do about it.
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