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AI Search is new enough that we constantly see people use words interchangeably when they shouldn’t be.
To help you understand when to use which terms and why, we’ve grouped together the essential list of words worth knowing in AI Search today.
Citation - A piece of content the AI draws from when it answers. You can see these as the cited sources listed under an AI answer.
Authentic brand mention - The content about your brand inside the source the AI is citing. This is the relevant and accurate information about your brand that’s in the source itself.
New Mention - A new, accurate brand mention placed in an article AI already cites for the questions your buyers ask, but where your brand isn't mentioned.
Mention Refresh - A correction to an existing brand mention that's inaccurate, out of date, or where your position could be improved.
Reverse mention - A brand mention exchange, typically between two brands who are willing to mention the other brand in their content.
Brand visibility - When your brand is named within the AI answer itself.
Retrieval - The AI reads live web pages while it answers, it doesn't only use what it learned from its training data. This is to make sure it has the most current information. You can watch this happen. It's the "searching the web" step before the answer appears.
Training data - Everything the AI learned before it was released. This is fixed until the company builds a new model, which takes months. It uses this information as the basis of its knowledge before moving into retrieval mode to verify and add depth to the answer.
Crawler - The bot that goes out and ingests pages across the internet in order to feed training data.
Index - The store of pages an AI has already ingested and searches through when it answers. Each one keeps its own, which is why ChatGPT and Claude can cite different sources for the same question.
Re-indexing - When a page gets ingested again and the stored copy is replaced with the current version. So, when a page changes, a crawler returns, the stored copy updates, and only then can the new version appear in an answer.
Pickup lag - The wait between a source going live or having been updated and AI answers reflecting the change.
AI Search - Anywhere someone asks a question and gets an answer from an AI instead of a list of links. That includes Google, which now prioritizes answering directly through AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Onsite - The first-party content you control and can edit yourself. Your website's page structure, comparison pages on your blog, FAQs, your own social accounts.
Offsite - Everything said about you on sites and accounts you don't control. Essentially, third-party content.
Zero-click - A search that ends without anyone visiting a website. This happens because the AI answer supplies enough information that there's no reason to click through the webpages that the information actually came from. The publishers of these pages then only see a fraction of the web traffic they used to.
Prompt list - The set of questions your buyers ask AI, and that you want to show up for.
Branded prompt - When someone asks AI about your brand by name. "Is Slack worth the cost?"
Non-branded prompt - When someone asks AI about the category without naming anyone. "Best expense software."
Citation frequency - How often AI cites a specific source with a link back to the source.
Position in the answer - How early the AI mentions your brand within the answer. Typically measured with visibility tools as "top," "middle," or "bottom." The earlier your brand appears, the more likely a buyer will read it.
Visibility score - How often your brand shows up in the answers for the prompts you're tracking, as a percentage.
Accuracy score - A percentage comparing your current pricing, positioning and product details against what AI actually says about you across thousands of answers.
Share of voice - Out of all the brands that appear across the prompts you track, what percentage are you. If a hundred brands are visible in the answer and twelve of them are yours, that's 12%. If two new competitors start showing up, your percentage drops even though you haven't lost anything. So read it as a share, not a count. Your percentage can fall in a month where your actual visibility went up.
Sentiment - Whether a mention reads positive, neutral or negative, given as a percentage for each based on the prompts being tracked.
This category is so young that we still haven’t figured out what to call it (GEO? AEO?), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be clear with the terms we use and why. This essential list should help!
As this category expands, so will this list.
About Noble: Noble helps you show up accurately and often in AI Search. Most of what AI says about a brand comes from third-party sources, and Noble works with publishers to update inaccurate mentions and add new ones in the sources AI cites, so customers discover you in the answers they read.
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