Glossary Measurement
Measurement
These terms tell you whether an AI answer engine actually surfaces and cites your catalog, or just paraphrases it. Share of voice, citation rate, impression share, and benchmark prompt sets turn "are we showing up?" into numbers you can track per part family and defend in a budget review.
9 terms
AI citation tracking
AI citation tracking is the practice of measuring when and where AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cite your pages as a named source, run across a fixed set of buyer prompts and logged over time. It tracks attribution, not keyword rank.
AI impression share
AI impression share is the percentage of AI answers in a defined category where your brand appears at all, mentioned or cited, across a fixed set of buyer prompts. It is the AI-answer analogue of paid impression share in Google Ads, applied to generative search results rather than ad auctions.
AI share of voice
AI share of voice is your brand's share of mentions or citations in AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews/AI Mode) versus competitors, across a fixed set of buyer prompts. It is usually expressed as a percentage of total brand mentions, not of prompts answered, and is vendor-defined with no standard formula.
AI visibility
AI visibility is how prominently a brand shows up — as a mention or cited source — in the answers AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) generate for its buyers' questions. The AI-search counterpart to search visibility, usually measured as mention rate, citation share, or share of voice rather than an ordinal rank.
AI visibility tracking
AI visibility tracking is the practice of monitoring how often and how favorably a brand appears in AI answers across engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, sampled over time. It is a marketing-measurement term, distinct from the security sense of "AI visibility," which means seeing what AI tools run inside an organization.
Benchmark prompts (prompt set)
Benchmark prompts are a fixed, representative set of buyer questions run repeatedly against AI search engines to measure whether and how often they cite your brand over time. The prompt set is the instrument behind every AI-share-of-voice number. It is unrelated to LLM-evaluation benchmarks that score model accuracy.
Cited-domain analysis
Cited-domain analysis is the practice of examining which websites an AI engine pulls from when it answers a category question, to identify the citation incumbents you must displace or get referenced by. It maps the current sources behind AI answers, not your own search rankings.
Mention rate vs citation rate
Mention rate is how often an AI answer names your brand across a set of prompts. Citation rate is how often that answer links or attributes a source to your domain. Mention rate measures awareness; citation rate measures source authority, and the two often diverge.
Zero-click search
Zero-click search is a search that ends without the user clicking through to any website, because the answer appears directly on the results page through featured snippets or AI Overviews. The term comes from SparkToro's Rand Fishkin, whose research tracked the share of searches that resolve without a click.
Find the hole. Then decide.
Most owners think they need more leads. They usually don’t. The calls that ring out and the quotes nobody chased are a bigger hole than the ad budget. Either way you leave with the numbers: the exact gap and the highest-payback fix, whether or not you hire us.