Glossary
The language of AI visibility
Plain-English definitions of the terms you'll see across Spottlo.
- AI visibility
- How often AI answer engines mention or recommend your brand when people ask buyer questions. It's the AI-era equivalent of ranking on Google — except the answer is generated, not a list of links.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- The practice of getting your brand to show up inside AI-generated answers. Where SEO optimizes for search rankings, GEO optimizes for being named and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
- Prompt
- A buyer-intent question we ask each AI engine on your behalf — e.g. "best project management software". We check whether your brand shows up in the answer. Good prompts are the real questions your customers ask, without naming you.
- AI engine (answer engine)
- A tool that answers questions with generated text instead of a list of links. Spottlo tracks four: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
- Mentioned
- Your brand name appears somewhere in the AI's answer. It means the model knows you exist for that question — the first step of AI visibility.
- Cited
- Stronger than mentioned: the AI links to your site or names you as a source. Citations drive real traffic and signal the engine trusts you as an authority, not just a name it recalls.
- Position / rank
- Where your brand appears among the names in an answer — first, second, third. Being named first carries far more weight than being buried at the end.
- Google AI Overviews
- The AI-generated summary Google now shows at the top of many search results, above the classic blue links. Being included is prime AI-era real estate — and it pulls from live web sources, so it behaves differently from the pure LLMs.
- Competitor leaderboard
- A ranking of you against the competitors you track, by Share of Voice. It answers "who is winning the AI answers in my market?" — and shows exactly which rivals the engines recommend instead of you.
- Movement alert
- A Slack notification we send when a brand's Share of Voice moves by a meaningful amount after a re-scan — so you hear about a swing in your AI visibility the moment it happens.
- Re-scan / refresh
- Running your prompts again to get fresh results. Brands refresh automatically every week (daily on the add-on), and you can trigger a manual "Refresh now" any time you've made a change worth re-checking.