Glossary
Industry terms, in plain words.
Terms you may hear elsewhere, matched to the plainer words this site uses for them.
- GEO, AEO, LLM SEO, answer engine optimisation
- Different names for how a company appears in AI answers. FwdLink observes the answers, helps you decide what to update, and observes again.
- AI visibility
- How AI answers to selected questions name a company, cite its pages and name competitors. On this site it is an observation under recorded conditions, not a score of all buyers.
- Mention
- An answer names the company or a confirmed alias. It can be positive, neutral or negative.
- Recommendation
- An answer that actually recommends the company, judged by a person from the exact sentence. A mention is not a recommendation.
- Citation
- An answer shows a URL as a source. A cited page is not a visit, and a search result that was not cited is not a citation.
- Prompt
- What somebody types into an AI. We call it a question.
- API
- A way for software to ask an AI directly, without the chat app. It is how we ask the same questions the same way each time. API answers are not consumer-app sessions.
- Collection status
- Whether an answer was collected: succeeded, failed, waiting or not collected. A failed answer is never counted as "not mentioned".
- Baseline
- Observations before anything is changed.
- Category question
- A question where a buyer is choosing and does not name your company. It can name a competitor, as in “alternatives to Competitor A”.
- Brand question
- A question that names your company.
- Share of voice
- How often you are named compared with others. We show the counts rather than a single share number.
- Hallucination
- An AI stating something that is not true. On this site: a possible error, flagged when an answer differs from a fact your team confirmed.
- Attribution
- Deciding what caused a result. We do not claim a page change caused a change in observations or in business results.
Next step
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