AI search glossary
New vocabulary, explained plainly.
The terms used when talking about being found by AI assistants, defined as precisely as the field currently allows. Where something is contested or oversold, that's said rather than smoothed over.
You don't need any of this vocabulary to use SearchDone — your weekly AI-answer results are in plain English. This page is for the curious.
Answer engine
Responds instead of listing
- A system that answers a question directly rather than returning a list of links — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews. The commercial consequence is that a customer can get what they came for without visiting anyone's website — unless the answer names you.
Citation
Being named as a source
- When an AI assistant attributes part of its answer to a specific page or business. The nearest thing to a ranking in this world, though unlike a ranking it isn't stable, isn't ordered, and isn't guaranteed to appear the same way twice. SearchDone records whether you're cited, week by week.
Entity
A thing, not a phrase
- A distinct real-world thing — a company, product, person, place — that an AI can reason about and relate to other things. Assistants resolve questions to entities, so being unambiguous about what you are matters more here than keyword phrasing ever did.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation
- The work of getting named by AI assistants. The measurement is genuinely different from SEO — being cited is a different event from ranking — but most of the underlying work overlaps: clear claims, sound structure, real entities, sources that check out. That's why SearchDone treats it as one job.
Grounding
Answers tied to sources
- When an assistant's answer is anchored to web pages it just read rather than produced from memory alone. Grounded answers are where citations come from, which is why being findable and quotable is the practical goal.
Hallucination
Confident and wrong
- An AI stating something false as fact. Relevant twice over: assistants can describe your business incorrectly, and any tool writing content for your site can invent claims. The second is why SearchDone puts a fact check in front of anything it publishes.
Prompt panel
Your tracked questions
- A fixed set of real customer questions checked on a schedule, so visibility is measured as a trend rather than a one-off. A single check is close to noise, because answers vary between sessions, regions and model versions. SearchDone runs yours weekly.
Retrieval
Fetching before answering
- The step where an assistant searches the web for relevant pages before answering. If your page is never retrieved it can never be cited, which makes ordinary findability a prerequisite for GEO rather than an alternative to it.
Zero-click
Answered without a visit
- A search satisfied without anyone clicking through. Long predates AI — featured snippets did this for years — but assistants accelerate it, which is why impressions and clicks alone are becoming an incomplete picture of visibility.
Find out whether an AI assistant names you.
Free to start. Set up your questions and the first check runs this week.
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