Glossary
Precise definitions for the terms used across this site. Each entry states what the term means, why it matters, an example, and the misunderstanding it most often attracts.
The practice of improving how AI-powered search and answer systems discover, understand, mention, summarize and cite a business.
The position within an AI-generated answer where a source is quoted or cited.
A distinct, identifiable thing — such as a company, person or product — that engines track and relate.
The step where an engine pulls candidate passages to build an answer.
An engine's attribution of part of a generated answer to a specific source.
The degree to which a passage can be quoted directly and correctly without its surrounding page.
A structured representation of entities and the relationships between them, used by search and answer systems.
Machine-readable markup, commonly JSON-LD, that states what a page and its subject are.
The proportion of answers to a defined set of queries in which a given brand is cited.
A contiguous block of text an engine can retrieve and quote independently of its page.
Search experiences that return a generated answer rather than, or alongside, a list of links.
The audit scores your business against the signals these definitions describe.