The vocabulary, without the fog.

How often an assistant names your business in its answers.

When somebody asks an assistant which supplier, hotel or agency to use, it names two or three. AI visibility is whether you are among them, where in the answer you appear, which sources the assistant read to decide, and how it described you. It differs from search ranking because there is no click and no referral: the recommendation happens entirely inside the answer, so nothing appears in your analytics either way.

A system that answers a question directly instead of listing links.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews are answer engines. They read sources and compose a response, so the competition is not for a position on a page but for being one of the sources the response is composed from. The practical consequence is that a page can be extremely valuable while receiving no traffic at all.

Generative engine optimisation: writing so an assistant can quote you accurately.

Where classic SEO is largely about being found and clicked, GEO is about being the passage a model lifts when it composes an answer. In practice it means answering the question early and plainly, keeping paragraphs self-contained so one can be extracted without losing meaning, naming entities explicitly rather than relying on pronouns, and giving figures with their source attached.

AI Overview optimisation: structuring a page to be extracted into a summary.

AI Overviews pull short, direct answers out of pages and display them above the results. AIO is the structural work that makes extraction possible: question-shaped headings, a short answer immediately beneath each one, lists and tables where the content is genuinely a list or a table, and no answer that depends on the paragraph before it to make sense.

The proportion of answers about your category that named you.

Measured across a fixed set of tracked questions asked repeatedly of each assistant. It should always be reported with a range rather than as a single figure, because asking the same question twice does not produce the same answer, and a number with no spread around it implies a precision that repeated sampling does not support.

A page ranking roughly fourth to twentieth for a query with real demand.

The most valuable thing in most search reports, because the page already exists and already half works: improving it is editing rather than writing. A page at position forty usually needs a different piece entirely, and one at position two has little left to gain, so the middle band is where a fixed amount of effort moves the most.

Two of your own pages competing for the same query, so neither wins.

Search engines pick one page per site for most queries. When two pages target the same intent, the signal splits between them and the newer page usually loses to the one that was already ranking. The fix is almost always to improve or consolidate the existing page rather than to publish a second one.

What the person searching is actually trying to do.

Informational means they want to understand something. Commercial means they are comparing options and close to deciding. Transactional means they have decided and want to buy or book. Navigational means they are looking for a specific business by name. Local means the demand is tied to a place. A content plan weighted entirely toward informational produces a blog nobody buys from.

A page losing traffic over time without anything about it changing.

Usually one of two shapes. Losing position on queries it used to hold, which normally means somebody published something better. Or holding position while losing clicks, which is a title and description problem rather than a content problem and is far quicker to fix.

Whether a model looked something up before answering, or answered from memory.

A grounded answer is composed from pages retrieved at the moment of asking and can cite them. An ungrounded answer comes from the model's training data, which describes the web as it was months ago. The distinction matters enormously for measurement: combining grounded and ungrounded results without labelling them produces a number that describes no point in time at all.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Google's framework for what makes a page worth surfacing, particularly on topics where bad information causes harm. In practice it rewards content that shows first-hand knowledge, names its author, cites its sources and is published somewhere with a track record on the subject. It is a description of quality rather than a score you can query.

How far ahead a piece must be commissioned to be live when it matters.

Content that has to rank by a date needs to exist well before it, because search engines take weeks to trust a new page. A Valentine's guide is commissioned before Christmas. The difference between a useful content calendar and a decorative one is whether it shows the day work has to start rather than only the day of the event.