Glossary
AI visibility, defined
Short, citable definitions of the terms used across Anserra and the AI-search field. Each term has its own page.
Updated:
- AI visibility
- AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name a business or brand in their answers to relevant user questions.Unlike a search ranking, it is probabilistic: the same question can return different names on different runs, so it is measured as a mention rate with a confidence interval.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- GEO is the practice of making a business or its content more likely to be included and cited in answers generated by AI engines.It overlaps with SEO but targets different mechanisms: machine readability, consistent structured data, presence on the sources engines cite, and content that directly answers the questions users ask assistants.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- AEO is optimization aimed at answer engines — systems that return a single synthesized answer rather than a list of links.In practice AEO and GEO are used interchangeably; Anserra uses “AI visibility” for the measurement and “GEO” for the work.
- Agent-ready
- A website is agent-ready when an AI agent acting for a customer can understand the offer, find the price, reach the booking or purchase step and contact a human, without human help.Anserra scores this with a real browser agent and maps the result to levels L0–L3 from the Agent-Ready Local Services specification.
- Transactability
- Transactability is the degree to which an AI agent can complete a transaction — a booking, a quote request, a purchase — on a business's website.It is the second half of AI visibility: being mentioned brings the agent to the site; transactability decides whether the agent can act there.
- Agent readiness check
- An agent readiness check is an automated test in which a browser agent attempts a set of customer tasks on a website and reports where it succeeds or stops.Anserra's check runs five tasks and only follows existing links; it never fills forms or submits anything.
- Levels L0–L3
- L0–L3 are conformance levels of the Agent-Ready Local Services specification: L0 not readable by agents, L1 readable (offer, contact, hours as text), L2 bookable (an agent can reach the booking step), L3 interoperable (machine-readable availability).
- agent-service.json
- agent-service.json is a file at /.well-known/agent-service.json that publishes a local service business's services, service area and slot availability in a machine-readable form for AI agents.It is the only new file the Agent-Ready Local Services specification introduces; everything else builds on existing schema.org markup.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that describes the site for large language models: what the business does, where, its prices, and how to contact or book.It is a proposed convention, not a standard every engine reads; it costs nothing and gives models a clean summary. Anserra generates it from scan data.
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is the file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may access; for AI visibility it decides whether crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot can read the site at all.Blocking these crawlers, often by accident through a generic rule, is the single most common reason a business is invisible to an engine.
- AI crawler
- An AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI provider to read web pages for training or for answering questions; examples are GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
- JSON-LD / schema.org markup
- JSON-LD is the format used to embed schema.org structured data in a page, so that machines can read facts like business type, address, hours, services and prices without parsing prose.For local businesses the relevant types are LocalBusiness and its subtypes (Dentist, Plumber, Attorney, Restaurant), Service, Offer and FAQPage.
- Mention rate
- Mention rate is the share of sampled AI answers to a prompt in which a business is named.Anserra reports it per prompt and per engine with a confidence interval; a difference is reported only when it exceeds the interval.
- Confidence interval
- A confidence interval is the range within which a measured rate is likely to fall given the number of samples taken; for a mention rate it expresses how much the number could move simply because AI answers vary.With three samples per prompt across 25 prompts, per-engine intervals are wide for a single prompt and narrow for the aggregate; the methodology page shows the calculation.
- Source analysis
- Source analysis is the identification of the pages and domains an AI engine cites when answering a set of prompts, and whether a given business is present and accurate on them.
- White-label report
- A white-label report is a report generated by a software platform and delivered under a reseller's own name and logo.On Anserra's Agency plans, PDFs and client result links carry the agency's brand; the report content stays as generated.
- Bulk scanning
- Bulk scanning is the queued scanning of a list of domains uploaded as a file, with per-domain results, a summary table and exports.
- AnserraBot
- AnserraBot is the user-agent of Anserra's crawler and browser agent (AnserraBot/0.1, +https://anserra.io/bot); it honors robots.txt, samples at most 12 pages on free scans and limits itself to 1 request per second per domain.
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries shown at the top of Google search results, with cited sources.They are one of Anserra's three base engines because they reach users who never open a chat assistant.
- Prompt set
- A prompt set is the list of questions Anserra sends to AI engines for a business — the questions a customer would ask an assistant when looking for that kind of business in that place.
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