Glossary
Speak the language of the answer layer.
Every term defined answer-first — the first sentence is the definition — because that is exactly the structure an engine lifts.
FIG.00 — 22 terms and their "see also" linksLIB/GLOSSARY.TS
- GEO Generative Engine Optimization
- GEO is the practice of being named, cited and described accurately inside AI-generated answers, rather than ranked in a list of links.
- See alsoAEOLLMOShare of model
- AEO Answer Engine Optimization
- AEO is structuring content so that an answer engine can resolve a question directly to it — answer-first, with the facts an engine needs stated plainly.
- See alsoGEOAnswer-first structure
- LLMO LLM Optimization
- LLMO is shaping how large language models represent a brand across both their training data and their live retrieval.
- See alsoRetrieval vs training basisGEO
- Visibility Score
- The Visibility Score is Synthic's 0–100 measure of how present a brand is in engine answers, computed as 55 × mention rate + 30 × average prominence/100 + 15 × citation rate over one audit's stored answers.
- See alsoMention rateProminenceCitation rate
- Mention rate
- Mention rate is the share of an audit's answers in which the engine named the brand.
- See alsoVisibility ScoreProminence
- Prominence
- Prominence is a 0–100 judgement of how early and how centrally a brand appears in an answer that mentions it.
- See alsoVisibility Score
- Citation rate
- Citation rate is the share of answers that cite a URL on the brand's own domain.
- See alsoRetrieval vs training basisVisibility Score
- Share of voice is the count of times each brand is named across the answers to a category's prompts — a leaderboard of who owns the answer today.
- See alsoShare of model
- Share of model is the percentage of category answers in which a given brand is the one recommended.
- See alsoShare of voice
- Retrieval vs training basis
- A mention's basis is retrieval when the engine backed it with a live citation, and training when it came from the model's memory with no source.
- See alsoLLMOCitation rate
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is a confident, specific claim an engine makes about a brand that the brand's own site contradicts or does not support.
- See alsoGround truth
- Ground truth
- Ground truth is the brand's own published content, crawled live at scan time and used as the reference every engine claim is checked against.
- See alsoHallucination
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at a site's root that hands language models a canonical, machine-readable summary of what the site is and where its key pages are.
- See alsoJSON-LDAEO
- JSON-LD
- JSON-LD is the structured-data format — Organization, WebSite, Product, FAQPage — that tells machines what a page is about in a form they can parse without guessing.
- See alsollms.txtAnswer-first structure
- Answer-first structure
- Answer-first structure puts the direct answer to a question in the first sentence under a heading that is the question.
- See alsoAEOJSON-LD
- AI crawler
- An AI crawler is a bot that fetches web pages to feed an answer engine — for training, for a search index, or live while a person waits for an answer.
- See alsoLive user agentrobots.txt
- Live user agent
- A live user agent (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) is a fetch made on behalf of a person in the middle of a conversation.
- See alsoAI crawler
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is the file at a site's root that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, per user agent.
- See alsoAI crawler
- Buyer persona
- A buyer persona is the lens an audit prompt is phrased through — general user, in-market buyer, startup founder, developer or enterprise evaluator.
- See alsoPrompt set
- Prompt set
- A prompt set is a fixed list of questions re-run across engines over time — the GEO equivalent of a rank tracker's keyword list.
- See alsoBuyer persona
- Zero-click
- A zero-click query is one resolved on the results page or inside an answer, with no visit to any site.
- See alsoGEO
- Citation graph
- The citation graph is the map of which pages and domains engines actually pull from when they answer questions in a category.
- See alsoCitation rate
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