The AI visibility glossary.
Plain-English definitions of the AI search vocabulary, and the metrics Buffy Intel reports on your brand.
Buffy= a metric or term specific to Buffy Intel. Everything else is industry-standard AI-search vocabulary.
"Best of" List (Listicle)
A ranked "best X" article. One of the most-cited page types in AI shopping answers, and usually published by third parties rather than brands.
BuffyAction Plan
A prioritised, regularly-refreshed set of recommendations to improve your AI visibility. Grouped into Owned, Earned, and Optimize.
AI search termAgentic browser
A web browser with a built-in AI agent that can read pages, compare options across tabs, fill forms, and complete multi-step tasks on your behalf, not just display websites.
AI search termAgentic Commerce
Shopping where an AI agent discovers, compares, and buys products on a person's behalf. Moving the buying decision from human browsing to machine selection.
AI search termAgentic Commerce Protocol (ACP / UCP)
Open standards that let AI agents complete a purchase. Exposing product, price, and checkout data in a machine-readable way. Examples: ACP (OpenAI + Stripe) and Google's UCP.
AI search termAI content licensing deal
A paid agreement letting an AI company use a content owner's material to train models or ground answers. In 2026 these deals run alongside scraping lawsuits, as publishers both license access to some operators and sue others.
AI search termAI Crawler (bot)
An automated bot that fetches web pages for an AI company. To train a model, build a search index, or pull a page live to answer a question.
AI search termAI Hallucination
When an AI generates plausible-sounding but false information. Including wrong facts about a brand, invented features, or fake citations.
AI search termAI Mode ads
Google's paid text ads shown inside AI Mode answers, allocated by ad auction and separate from the sources the answer cites.
AI search termAI Overviews
Google's AI-generated answer summaries that appear above traditional search results, synthesising and citing sources for a query.
BuffyAI Visibility Score
A composite 0-100 score blending share of voice, top-ranked %, average rank, and citation coverage into one headline read of how visible your brand is across AI answers.
AI search termAI-Readiness Audit
A structured check of whether AI engines can reach, read, understand, corroborate, and quote your site. Grading crawler access, extractability, product data, off-site presence, and quotability, usually as scored pillars.
AI search termAnswer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Optimizing your content to become the cited source when AI answer engines generate a direct response to a question.
AI search termAnswer Poisoning
Deliberately seeding false or manipulated content into the sources an AI engine retrieves, so the synthesised answer repeats the falsehood — a corpus-level attack that exploits engines corroborating claims rather than verifying them.
AI search termAnswer Volatility
How much an AI engine's answer. The brands it names and the sources it cites. Changes when the same or a slightly reworded question is asked again.
AI search termAP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
Google's open standard for agent payments that attaches a cryptographically signed proof of human authorisation — a Mandate — to each transaction, so a merchant or bank can verify the person actually approved what the agent is paying for.
AI search termAstroturfing
Manufacturing fake grassroots endorsement. Using coordinated fake accounts, planted posts, or paid engagement to make brand promotion look like organic community consensus.
AI search termAttribute Query
A search that names specific, granular properties the answer must satisfy, such as 'nonstop flights under a set budget' or 'restaurant with outdoor seating and vegan options', rather than a broad keyword.
BuffyAverage Rank
Your brand's average position in AI-recommended lists across prompts where it's mentioned. Lower is better. #1 means consistently first.
BuffyBrand Perception
A qualitative read of how AI platforms collectively describe and position your brand, based on branded queries.
AI search termBrand-Citation Rate
The share of an AI engine's answers that name a specific brand, used to measure how often a brand surfaces in AI responses for a given set of questions and on a given engine.
AI search termCitation (AI / LLM)
When an AI answer references and links a source it used. Being cited (not just mentioned) is how you earn trust and AI-referred traffic.
BuffyCitation Coverage
Of the AI answers that mention your brand, the share that also cite your brand's own website as a source.
AI search termCitation fingerprint
The distinctive mix of page types (listicles, articles, homepages, product or program pages) that AI engines cite when answering questions in a given industry.
AI search termCitation Gap (Source Gap)
The difference between the sources AI engines cite for your category and the ones that mention you. Revealing where you're absent from the answer.
AI search termCitation Hallucination
When an AI produces a reference that looks legitimate but fails at the level of identity. Either the cited work doesn't exist, or a real work is credited to substantially the wrong authors.
AI search termCitation hero page
One of the small set of pages on your own site that earns a disproportionate share of your AI citations, while most of your other pages earn none.
AI search termCitation Turnover
How quickly the set of URLs an AI engine cites is replaced over time — the share of cited sources that rotate in or out between measurements.
BuffyCited Pages
The unique URLs AI cites as sources when mentioning your brand.
AI search termCommodity Content
Content that restates what many pages already cover without adding first-hand experience or unique knowledge, making it easily replaceable and increasingly hard to get indexed or cited.
AI search termContent Chunk
A self-contained passage, usually one section of a page, that answers a single question on its own, and the unit an AI engine actually retrieves and cites, rather than the whole page.
AI search termContent Decay (Citation Cliff)
The decline in how often AI engines cite a page as it ages. Live retrieval favors recently-updated content, so citations fall off after roughly a quarter.
AI search termContent Graveyard
The large pool of pages and domains that an AI engine cites once and then never again — the opposite of the small set that holds a durable citation position.
AI search termConversational Query
A single follow-up turn in a multi-turn AI search conversation that the engine counts as its own independent query, rather than as part of the original question.
AI search termConversational Search
Searching by asking full, natural-language questions. Often in a back-and-forth. Instead of typing keywords, the way people use ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Perplexity.
AI search termCorrelation vs causation
The distinction between two signals moving together (correlation) and one actually producing the other (causation), the error at the heart of most AI-visibility claims, where a factor common to cited pages is mistaken for the reason they're cited.
AI search termCorroboration
Multiple independent, credible sources agreeing on the same fact. A strong signal that makes AI engines more willing to state and cite it.
AI search termCrawl-to-refer ratio
The number of pages an AI operator's crawler fetches for every visitor its assistant refers back to a site. A high ratio (thousands-to-one for pure-AI bots) is the normal shape of AI discovery, not a failure.
AI search termDark Library Effect
The gap between how heavily AI crawls and cites a page and how little referral traffic it sends back. Most visible on articles, which AI reads and summarises but rarely links a visitor to.
AI search termDark Traffic
Real visits whose true source is invisible to analytics. They arrive with no referrer and get filed as 'Direct,' hiding much of your AI-driven traffic.
AI search termDecision-Grade Measurement
AI-visibility data rigorous enough to base high-stakes decisions on — budget, agency reviews, strategy — as distinct from directional data that only signals a trend.
AI search termDomain Authority
A third-party, backlink-based score (Moz's DA, Ahrefs' DR) that estimates classic search-ranking strength. A weak predictor of AI citations.
AI search termE-E-A-T
Google's quality framework. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Signals that also shape whether AI engines treat your content as a credible source.
AI search termEarned Media
Coverage and mentions a brand earns from independent third parties. Press, reviews, forums, and best-of lists. Rather than pays for (paid media) or publishes itself (owned media). It is the dominant source of AI citations.
AI search termEmbeddings
Numeric representations of meaning that let an AI judge how related two pieces of text are. The basis of semantic search and retrieval.
AI search termEntity Authority
How strongly and credibly AI associates your brand with a topic. A strong predictor of AI citations, often more than backlinks or technical SEO.
AI search termExtractability
How cleanly an AI engine can lift a single self-contained answer from a page — the passage-level readability that decides whether a retrieved page actually gets quoted.
AI search termFeatured Snippet
A short, direct answer Google lifts to the top of search results. The pre-AI ancestor of today's AI-generated answers, and a useful model for extractable content.
AI search termFirst-Party Citation
A citation in which an AI engine names a brand's own website as the source for a claim, as opposed to a third-party or earned citation pointing at a review site, roundup, or community page.
AI search termGenerative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of getting your brand mentioned, cited, and recommended across generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
AI search termGhost Citation
When an AI answer uses your page as a source and links it, but never names your brand in the text. A citation with no mention attached.
AI search termGoogle AI Mode
Google's conversational, AI-generated search experience. A full chat interface powered by Gemini, distinct from the shorter AI Overview summary.
AI search termGrounding
Connecting an AI's answer to verifiable external sources, so claims are backed by retrieved evidence rather than the model's memory.
BuffyHero Products
Your flagship products. Each gets a dedicated deep-dive prompt and is scored individually for how favourably AI describes it.
AI search termHoldout test
A measurement method that leaves a comparable group deliberately unchanged so a treated group's outcome can be read against a real counterfactual, isolating cause from correlation.
AI search termInformation Gain
How much genuinely new information a page adds beyond what already ranks for the same query. Search and AI engines reward high information gain — original data, first-hand detail — over content that only restates what is already indexed.
AI search termKnowledge Cutoff
The date after which a model's training data stops, so without live search, it doesn't 'know' anything more recent.
AI search termKnowledge Graph
A structured map of real-world entities. Brands, products, people, and the relationships between them, used by search and AI engines to 'know' what your brand is.
AI search termLarge Language Model (LLM)
An AI model trained on vast amounts of text that predicts and generates language. The engine behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and AI search.
AI search termllms.txt
A proposed standard. A Markdown file at /llms.txt, that gives AI crawlers a concise, curated guide to your site's most important content.
AI search termMixed-use crawler
A web crawler that serves more than one purpose — search indexing, AI-agent fetching, and model training — behind a single user-agent, so allowing it for one job also allows the others.
AI search termMultimodal Search
Searching with images or voice, not just typed text. A fast-growing share of AI queries, where the engine interprets a photo or spoken question.
AI search termParametric Memory
What a language model 'remembers' from training, stored in its weights, as opposed to information it retrieves from the live web at answer time.
AI search termPosition-Adjusted Word Count
A metric from the Princeton GEO study that measures how much of a source's wording appears in an AI-generated answer, weighted by how prominently that source is cited.
AI search termProduct Feed
A structured file of your products, one row per item with attributes like title, price, availability, and GTIN, that feeds shopping and AI systems the facts they surface.
AI search termPrompt
The question or instruction a person gives an AI. The AI-search equivalent of a search query, but usually longer and more conversational.
AI search termPrompt Injection
Trying to manipulate an AI's output by feeding it crafted text. Including attempts to plant fake rankings or claims a model might repeat.
AI search termPrompt-to-visit rate
The share of AI prompts in a category that lead the same person to visit a relevant site within a set time window. It rises sharply the longer the window, because most AI-referred visits arrive days after the prompt, not minutes.
AI search termQuery Fan-Out
When an AI decomposes one user question into several parallel sub-searches, then synthesises the results, so a single prompt pulls from many sources.
AI search termQuery Freshness Window
The recency limit an AI search tool attaches to a background search — how recently a page must have been updated to be preferred for that specific query, often set in days.
AI search termReddit product page
A product-specific page Reddit generates from redditor conversations — an AI-written summary of what people said plus direct quotes, and, when a brand supplies a catalog, an image, price, and buy link.
AI search termRetrievability
The likelihood that an AI engine pulls your page into the candidate set of sources it considers for a query, before any question of prominence or citation.
AI search termRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
An architecture that pairs a language model with live document retrieval, so answers are grounded in fetched sources rather than memory alone.
AI search termrobots.txt
A file at your domain root that tells crawlers. Including AI bots, which pages they may or may not fetch.
AI search termSame-Origin Policy
The browser security rule, in use since 1995, that stops one website from reading another site's data — even when one is embedded in the other.
AI search termSearch Generative AI Control
A Google Search Console setting that removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features while leaving its normal Search ranking, indexing, and snippets untouched.
AI search termSelf-Preferencing
When an AI answer surface disproportionately cites its own or its owner's properties as sources, rather than independent third-party pages.
AI search termSemantic Search
Retrieval based on meaning rather than exact keywords. Matching the intent behind a query to content that answers it, using embeddings.
AI search termSentiment Analysis
Measuring not just whether a brand is mentioned in AI answers, but how it's described. Positive, negative, or neutral.
BuffyShare of Voice (SoV)
The percentage of AI answers to category prompts that mention your brand at all.
AI search termShopper Agent
A brand-owned AI agent that handles the shopping conversation. Discovery, comparison, checkout, and service. In the brand's voice, increasingly surfaced inside AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.
AI search termSilent Source
A page an AI engine reads and uses during retrieval to shape its answer, but never links or names in the final response. It informs the answer invisibly.
AI search termSite Reputation Abuse
Publishing third-party content on an established, trusted site mainly to exploit that site's ranking and citation signals. A named Google spam tactic, sometimes called parasite SEO.
AI search termsite: operator
A search operator (site:example.com) that restricts results to a single domain, now used heavily inside AI query fan-outs to pull facts from a specific trusted source.
AI search termSpam Update
A periodic Google algorithm update that enforces its spam policies, demoting sites that violate them — and, because AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in Google's ranked results, one that can reduce a demoted site's AI-answer citations too.
AI search termStablecoin
A cryptocurrency token designed to hold a stable value by being pegged to a reserve asset. Usually the US dollar, so it can be used for payment rather than speculation.
AI search termStructured Data (Schema markup)
Machine-readable Schema.org markup (Product, FAQ, Organization, etc.) that labels what your content is, making it far easier for AI to parse and cite.
AI search termThe great decoupling
The widening gap between search impressions, which stay high or rise, and clicks, which fall, as AI Overviews and other answer features satisfy searchers on the results page instead of sending them to a site.
BuffyTop-Ranked %
Of the AI answers that mention your brand, the share that rank it #1. The single top pick.
BuffyTotal Mentions
The total number of times your brand was mentioned across all tracked prompts in the latest analysis.
AI search termUCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)
Google's open-source standard for the agentic shopping journey — a shared set of primitives for how an AI agent discovers products, builds a cart, checks out, and tracks fulfilment across merchants, with payment handed off to AP2.
AI search termVerified bot
A crawler whose identity is confirmed by network or cryptographic evidence, reverse DNS to published IP ranges or a signed request, rather than by its self-declared user-agent string, which anyone can spoof.
AI search termVideo AEO
The practice of structuring video, especially on YouTube, so AI answer engines can retrieve, understand, and cite it, primarily through its transcript, captions, chapters, and structured data.
AI search termVisibility concentration
The degree to which a category's AI-answer visibility is held by a small number of brands, usually measured as the share of total category visibility owned by its top few brands.
AI search termWalled garden
A platform that restricts outside AI agents and crawlers from reading its pages or acting in its accounts, to keep shoppers, data, and ad revenue inside its own ecosystem.
AI search termWeb Discovery Project
Brave's open-source, opt-in system that builds its search index from anonymous signals contributed by Brave browsers. The discovery layer that decides which pages Brave (and, downstream, Claude) can find.
AI search termx402
An open standard for paying over HTTP that revives the dormant 402 'Payment Required' status code, so an AI agent, app, or crawler can pay for a resource inside an ordinary web request, with no checkout page.
AI search termZero-Click Search
When a search or AI answer satisfies the query on the results surface itself, so the user never clicks through to a website.