The Language of AI Visibility
Every term, metric, and platform feature — organized by what matters. From the concepts shaping AI discovery to the tools that move the numbers.
Browse concepts ↓The Foundation of AI Visibility
The concepts that define the category. If you're new to AI visibility, start here.
AEO (AI Engine Optimization)
visiblThe practice of optimizing content and digital presence to improve visibility within AI-powered search engines and assistants. Think SEO, but for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Instead of ranking on a list, you're getting cited in an answer.
AI Visibility
visiblWhether and how AI engines mention, recommend, or cite your brand when users ask relevant questions. The new layer of digital presence beyond traditional search rankings. You can rank #1 on Google and still be invisible to AI.
Ghost Routes
visiblPages that rank well in Google Search Console but have zero presence in AI-generated answers. A term coined by visibl to describe the gap between traditional search performance and AI discovery. Your traffic looks healthy, but it's at risk.
Revenue at Risk
visiblEstimated monthly revenue exposure from pages that aren't being cited in AI recommendations. Calculated by syncing Stripe transaction data with AI citation rates — verified numbers, not estimates.
Discovery Layer
The interface through which users find information. It's shifting from traditional search (Google's ten blue links) to AI-powered synthesized answers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity). The discovery layer determines who gets found.
Indexing Gap
The difference between what traditional search engines index and what AI engines can access and cite. Many pages indexed by Google are completely invisible to AI retrieval systems. This gap is where Ghost Routes live.
How AI Engines Actually Work
The mechanics behind AI-generated answers. Understanding these makes everything else click.
LLM (Large Language Model)
The AI models powering answer engines — GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, Llama. They generate text by predicting what comes next, drawing on training data and (increasingly) real-time retrieval. Understanding how LLMs prioritize information is the foundation of AEO.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A technique where AI engines retrieve relevant documents in real-time to augment their responses. RAG is why fresh, well-structured content matters — it's not baked into the model, it's pulled live. If your content isn't RAG-friendly, it doesn't get cited.
Hallucination
When an AI engine generates information that isn't supported by its training data or retrieved sources. Can result in incorrect brand mentions, fabricated product claims, or confidently wrong recommendations. Grounding reduces hallucination risk.
Grounding
The process by which AI engines verify generated answers against source material. Well-grounded responses include citations and factual claims; poorly grounded ones hallucinate. Your content's structure directly affects how well it can ground an AI response.
Training Cutoff
The date after which an LLM has no inherent knowledge. Content published after the cutoff relies entirely on RAG for AI visibility. If your latest product launch happened after the cutoff, it's invisible unless retrieved in real-time.
Model Training Data
The corpus of text used to train an LLM. Content in training data may influence an AI engine's baseline knowledge about a brand, separate from real-time retrieval. Think of it as the model's "memory" before it looks anything up.
Prompt Sensitivity
How variations in user queries affect which brands and sources an AI engine cites. The same question phrased differently can produce completely different brand recommendations. "Best CRM" and "CRM for small teams" might cite entirely different products.
How We Measure AI Visibility
The numbers that tell you where you stand. Every metric in the visibl dashboard, explained.
Visibility Score (0–100)
visiblThe primary KPI. A composite metric measuring your brand's overall presence across AI engines. Combines four weighted components: Mention Rate (0–30), Mention Depth (0–15), Sentiment (0–15), and Product Component (0–40).
Mention Rate
visiblPercentage of AI responses that mention your brand, weighted up to 30 points in the Visibility Score. If you're mentioned in 60% of relevant queries, that's a strong signal. 0% means you're a Ghost Route.
Mention Depth
visiblHow many times you're mentioned per AI response, worth up to 15 points. Being mentioned once in passing is different from being featured as the primary recommendation with detailed context.
Sentiment (AI)
visiblHow favorably AI engines describe your brand when they mention it. Classified as Positive, Neutral, Negative, or Mixed. Worth up to 15 points. Being mentioned isn't enough — being mentioned well is what drives conversions.
Product Component Score
visiblAverage product-level visibility, weighted up to 40 points — the heaviest component of the Visibility Score. Measures how individual products or offerings perform across AI engines, not just the brand overall.
Market Presence
visiblPercentage of tested prompts where your brand gets mentioned. A straightforward coverage metric — out of all the ways someone could ask about your category, how often do you show up?
Gap Score
visiblHigh organic traffic + low AI visibility = high gap score. Identifies your biggest optimization opportunities — pages where you're already winning in traditional search but losing in AI discovery.
Schema Health Score
visiblA 0–100 assessment of your JSON-LD structured data quality. Measures completeness, accuracy, and optimization of schema markup — the technical foundation that makes your content machine-readable to AI systems.
AI Penetration Rate
visiblPercentage of your total traffic that comes from AI referrer domains (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.). Tracks how much of your audience is discovering you through AI channels versus traditional search.
Inside the visibl Platform
Every tool and workspace in visibl. From monitoring to execution — what each feature actually does.
Actions Lab
visiblSplit-pane execution workspace. Strategy on the left (citation gaps, Ghost Routes, Revenue at Risk per URL). Execution on the right (auto-generated schema, content templates, protocol updates). Deploy fixes without developer tickets.
Content Studio
visiblAI-powered content creation workspace for producing AEO-optimized articles. Includes collaborative editing, section management, version history, and multiple export formats. Publication workflows from draft to live.
Prompt Blast
visiblBulk prompt execution campaign. Run hundreds of test queries across multiple AI engines simultaneously to measure visibility at scale. Think of it as a crawl, but for AI answers instead of web pages.
Product Lab
visiblProduct-level management and visibility tracking. Monitor individual SKUs across AI engines, track per-product visibility scores, and identify which products need attention versus which are already being recommended.
AI Agent (visibl)
visiblIn-platform AI assistant that answers questions about your visibility data, generates recommendations, and navigates you to relevant dashboard views. Multi-step task automation with deep context about your brand's AI presence.
Watchlist
visiblMonitor specific brands and competitors in real-time. Track their AI mention trends, citation changes, and competitive movements. Get alerted when a competitor's visibility shifts meaningfully.
Playbook
visiblAI-generated action plans based on your visibility data. Prioritized recommendations for on-site fixes, off-site opportunities, PR plays, social signals, and technical improvements — ranked by expected impact.
Authority Lab
visiblAnalyzes which high-authority sources get cited alongside your brand in AI responses. Uses Tranco domain rankings to identify where you should be mentioned — and where you're missing. The citation network that matters for AI.
Priority Intelligence
visiblYou have 1M+ pages. visibl finds the 50 that actually move the needle. Automated page prioritization that combines AI citation volume, revenue attribution, and optimization gap into a single ranked list.
Unified Command
visiblOne dashboard for every team Normalizes data from different tools into a shared vocabulary so SEO, dev, marketing, content, and analytics teams all operate from the same definition of success.
Instant Deploy
visiblPush fixes live — no dev tickets. Collapses the timeline from the typical 90-day sprint cycle to seconds. See a schema issue, fix it, deploy it. All from the same interface.
Zero-Queue Execution
visiblSkip the backlog, deploy directly The traditional workflow — Jira tickets, sprint slots, QA cycles, deployment windows — takes 90 days for a 30-second fix. Zero-Queue removes the queue entirely.
AI Agents Are Already Buying
The protocols, standards, and concepts behind AI-powered shopping. Where e-commerce meets autonomous agents.
Agentic Commerce
The emerging channel where AI shopping agents — like OpenAI Operator and Google Shopping AI — autonomously browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users. The next evolution of e-commerce, where the buyer is an algorithm.
ACP (Agent Commerce Protocol)
OpenAI's standard for how AI shopping agents discover and transact with online stores. Defines how products are surfaced, compared, and purchased through ChatGPT Shopping and related agent interfaces.
UCP (Unified Commerce Protocol)
Google's standard for how AI agents discover, evaluate, and transact with products across their ecosystem. Works through Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping AI. The other half of the dual-protocol landscape.
Inventory-Aware AEO
visiblPreventing AI agents from recommending products you can't ship. visibl syncs Google Merchant Center and Shopify feeds so out-of-stock items aren't surfaced in AI shopping recommendations.
Catalog Readiness
visiblHow prepared your product catalog is for AI agent evaluation. Covers data quality (titles, descriptions, attributes), machine readability (schema, feeds, APIs), and trust signals (reviews, ratings, inventory status).
The Infrastructure of AI Discovery
The structural and technical concepts that determine whether AI engines can find, understand, and cite your content.
AI Crawlability
How accessible your content is to AI systems that index and retrieve information for generating answers. Not the same as Google crawlability. A page can be perfectly crawlable by Googlebot and completely invisible to AI retrieval systems.
Semantic Structure
How content is organized to help AI engines understand topics, relationships, and hierarchy. Clean headings, logical sections, clear definitions before jargon. The better the structure, the easier it is for AI to extract and cite your content.
JSON-LD Schema
Structured data markup embedded in your pages that tells AI engines exactly what your content is about. Product specs, FAQ answers, organization details, article metadata — all in a format machines read natively. The technical backbone of AEO.
Entity Recognition
How AI engines identify and categorize brands, products, and topics within content. Strong entity recognition — consistent naming, clear definitions, structured markup — increases the likelihood of being cited correctly.
Knowledge Graph
A structured database of entities and their relationships that AI engines use to understand and connect concepts. Being represented in knowledge graphs increases AI visibility. It's how AI knows that "visibl" is a company, not just a word.
Topical Authority
The degree to which AI engines recognize a domain as an expert source on a specific subject. Built through comprehensive, interlinked content clusters — not individual pages, but a body of work that signals deep expertise.
Citation
When an AI engine references a specific source (URL, brand, or content piece) in its generated answer. The AI equivalent of a backlink. Source attribution is the currency of AI visibility — no citation, no credit.
Content Authority Signals
Indicators that help AI engines determine which sources to trust and cite. Includes domain expertise, content depth, editorial standards, authorship credentials, and third-party validation. The trust layer that separates cited sources from ignored ones.
The Engines That Matter
The AI platforms visibl monitors. Each engine discovers, processes, and recommends content differently.
ChatGPT
General AIOpenAI's conversational AI. The largest consumer AI platform by users. ChatGPT's recommendations carry weight because hundreds of millions of people ask it questions daily. Now includes Shopping features for product discovery.
Gemini
General AIGoogle's AI model family. Integrated into Google Search, Workspace, and Android. Matters because it has direct access to Google's search index and knowledge graph — the largest information retrieval system on earth.
Perplexity
Search AIAI-native search engine that cites sources prominently. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity always attributes answers to specific URLs. High-value for brands because citations drive direct traffic — the closest AI equivalent to a Google search result.
Grok
General AIxAI's conversational model, integrated into the X (Twitter) platform. Access to real-time social data gives it unique context about trending topics, sentiment, and brand mentions that other models lack.
Claude
General AIAnthropic's AI assistant. Known for careful, well-sourced responses and strong reasoning capabilities. Growing market share in enterprise and developer contexts, making it increasingly relevant for B2B brand visibility.
Google AI Overviews
Search AIAI-generated answer summaries that appear at the top of Google Search results. The most impactful AI surface for most brands because it sits directly in the search flow billions of people already use daily.
SearchGPT
Search AIOpenAI's dedicated search product. Combines the conversational interface of ChatGPT with real-time web retrieval and source attribution. A direct competitor to Google Search, with growing adoption.
Amazon Rufus
Retail AIAmazon's AI shopping assistant. Helps shoppers compare products, understand features, and make purchasing decisions within the Amazon ecosystem. For e-commerce brands, Rufus is where product visibility meets purchase intent.
Walmart AI
Retail AIWalmart's AI-powered product discovery and recommendation system. A key retail AI surface for brands selling through Walmart's marketplace, with autonomous product comparison and purchase assistance.
AI Answer Engine
The category itself. Any search interface that generates synthesized answers using large language models instead of returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — they're all answer engines. This is the new battleground.
See These Concepts in Action
Every concept here lives inside the visibl platform. Book a demo and see how they work together.