The vocabulary, without the vagueness.
Half the confusion around AI search is people using the same word for different things. Here is what we mean by each one.
- 01CorpusIs anything written about you, in the market’s language
- 02Entity resolutionDoes all of it count as the same brand
- 03CitabilityDoes a passage survive being lifted out
- 04Structured dataAre the facts stated in a form a machine reads
measured asNamed rateHow many of a fixed panel of questions produce an answer containing your brand
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting a brand named and accurately described inside the synthesised answers produced by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, rather than ranked in a list of links.
- Citability
- Citability is how readily a passage of text can be lifted out of a page and used verbatim in an AI answer.
- Corpus
- A corpus is the body of text an AI system draws on when it answers a question about a category — your own site, marketplace listings, retailer pages, review publications, forum threads and video transcripts.
- Entity resolution
- Entity resolution is the process by which a search or AI system decides that several mentions — a brand name, a legal name, a romanised spelling, a social handle — all refer to the same organisation.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Generative engine optimization is a term used interchangeably with answer engine optimization for the practice of improving how a brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a website's root that lists its most important pages with short descriptions, intended to help AI systems understand the site.
- Named rate
- Named rate is the share of a fixed panel of buyer questions that produce an AI answer containing your brand name.
- Prompt panel
- A prompt panel is a fixed set of buyer questions — Searchd uses 40 — run across multiple AI engines on a regular schedule to measure brand visibility in AI answers over time.
- Structured data
- Structured data is machine-readable markup — Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD — that states explicitly what a page is about, who published it, and how its entities relate.
Find out what AI says about your brand.
Send us your brand and category. We run 20 buyer questions across five engines by hand and send you the transcript within 48 hours.
- What arrives
- 20 questions, 5 engines, every answer quoted in full
- Who sends it
- Snow Lee, by hand, from Seoul
- Your email
- Used to send the report and reply about it. Privacy.
| Buyer question | Engine | Named |
|---|---|---|
| best Korean sunscreen for oily skin | ChatGPT | not named |
| K-beauty sunscreen that does not pill | Claude | named |
| Korean skincare brands sold at Ulta | AI Overviews | not named |
| …17 more questions, with the verbatim answer and every source cited | ||