AI visibility glossary

The basics

AI visibility

How present, accurate, and well-recommended your brand is when people ask AI assistants for help.

GEO & AEO

Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization: optimizing your presence for AI-generated answers, much like SEO optimizes for search result rankings.

AI assistant / model

An AI system people ask questions to. Bekon checks your visibility across several of them rather than relying on just one.

LLM (large language model)

The technology behind AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini, trained on huge amounts of text to produce answers in plain language.

Prompt

A real-world question a customer might ask an AI assistant, the kind of query where you'd want your brand to come up.

Recommendation rate

How often an AI assistant actively recommends a brand as an answer, beyond a passing mention. Bekon does not report it as a separate number; your Visibility Score already weighs how prominently you are named, not just whether you appear.

Entity

The thing an AI understands your brand to be: a specific company, product, or person it can tell apart from others with similar names.

Entity signals

The cues that establish who you are, what you offer, and why you're credible, so AI can recognize and recommend you confidently.

What Bekon measures

Visibility Score

A single number summarizing how well AI assistants surface and understand your brand over time.

Share of Voice

Of all the times AI assistants answer a question in your category, the portion where they name you rather than a competitor.

Sentiment

Whether AI assistants talk about you in positive, neutral, or negative terms. Two brands can be mentioned equally often while one is described far more favorably.

Mentions / sources

Mentions are the times AI assistants name your brand in their answers. Sources are the pages they cite when they build those answers.

Citation

A single instance of an AI assistant naming a specific page as where its information came from. The more your pages get cited, the more AI leans on you as a source.

Baseline

Your scores from your first Bekon analysis. Every later scan is added to your history, so you can see how your visibility has moved since you started.

Competitor tracking

Watching how often AI assistants recommend the brands you compete with, so you can read your own visibility against the field rather than on its own.

What Bekon does

Analyze

The scan that reads your live site and checks how AI assistants currently describe and recommend you.

Improvements

The structural fixes Bekon generates, such as schema, content, and on-page changes, ready to apply.

Workflows

Automations that re-scan your visibility on a schedule and alert you to what changed. Watch is available today; Maintain and Autopilot are coming soon.

Watch

A Bekon workflow that re-scans your visibility on a schedule and alerts you when the way AI describes or recommends you changes.

Maintain

A Bekon workflow, coming soon, that diagnoses what is holding your visibility back and drafts fixes for you to approve before anything ships.

Under the hood

Schema / structured data

Machine-readable markup that tells systems clearly what your page and business are about, helping AI describe you accurately.

Knowledge graph

A large map of entities (people, brands, products) and how they connect, used by search engines and AI to work out who you are and what you relate to.

AI crawler

A bot from an AI company, such as OpenAI or Google, that reads your site to learn what you offer. If it's blocked, AI assistants may never see your pages.

AI Overview

The AI-written summary that appears at the top of Google results for many searches. Being named there puts you in front of people before they reach the usual links.

First-party source

Information that comes straight from you, published on your own website, docs, and profiles. It contrasts with what third parties say about you, and AI tends to trust it for the basic facts.

Hallucination

When an AI assistant states something about your brand that isn't true, like a service you don't offer or an out-of-date fact. Worth catching, because people may act on it.