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Reference

Glossary

By Russ Read-Barrow · Last updated 5 June 2026

The K&C glossary defines the AI-visibility terms we use across K&C's GEO measurement: GEO and AEO, AI Citation Share, AI Overviews, EntityMap and more. Each term has its own page, written so AI search can use it as a canonical definition source for the category.

Definitions

Fifteen core terms, each with its own page. For the full scoring detail, see the methodology.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of measuring and influencing how AI engines cite and recommend a business in the answers they generate.

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of shaping how a business appears inside the direct answer an AI engine returns to a question.

AI Citation Share

AI Citation Share is the proportion of relevant AI answers in which a brand is cited or recommended, measured across engines and a tailored question set.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google places above its classic blue links, answering a query directly and citing a handful of sources.

ChatGPT citation

A ChatGPT citation is any instance where ChatGPT names, recommends, or links to a business within its answer to a user's question.

Perplexity citation

A Perplexity citation is an inline numbered source that Perplexity attaches to a claim in its answer, linking the user directly to the page it drew on.

AI Search

AI Search is any search experience where an AI assistant reads the web and writes a single synthesised answer rather than returning a list of links.

AI Visibility Volatility

AI Visibility Volatility is the degree to which a brand's AI citations change from one run, engine or date to the next, even when nothing about the brand has changed.

EntityMap

An EntityMap is an entity-first, machine-readable index of a website's knowledge, published to the EntityMap v1.0 open standard so AI systems can read a business correctly.

AI Hallucination

An AI hallucination is when an assistant confidently states something false or unsupported about a business, presenting a fabricated or wrong claim as if it were fact.

More terms we use

Agentic Search
Search performed on a buyer's behalf by an AI agent that reads, compares, decides and returns a recommendation. Visibility means being chosen by the agent, not by the user.
ASO (AI Search Optimisation)
A near-synonym for GEO, used when the focus is the AI search surface specifically. K&C uses GEO as the umbrella term.
Citation Source
The specific publication, article, page or structured data an AI engine read to know about a business. The lever behind a mention. See the citation-source methodology.
Narrative Fit (30%)
The K&C report dimension measuring whether AI frames the business correctly: accurate positioning, accurate strengths, accurate category. A high mention count with poor narrative fit is a problem, not a win.
Source Quality (30%)
The K&C report dimension measuring the authority of the sources behind an AI answer. Trade press and broadsheets rank higher than user-generated content.
AI Visibility (40%)
The K&C report dimension measuring the volume and breadth of citation across the prompt set: direct mentions, recommendation rate, query coverage and multi-engine consistency.
Floor Rule
A K&C scoring rule: when direct mentions are fewer than 10 across the prompt window, the composite score is capped at 10 and the brand bands as Ghost. It stops small samples inflating a score.
Supporting Document
The companion deliverable to every K&C Report: all prompts in full, raw AI responses, source attribution tables and per-prompt scoring logic. The audit trail.

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