The AI-visibility glossary

An AI system that gives people a direct answer instead of a page of links. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews are all answer engines. When a shopper asks one what to buy, it names a few products and moves on, so being named is the whole game.

The practice of making your store the source an answer engine trusts and names. Where old-school SEO fought for a rank on a results page, AEO works to be the shop the AI actually recommends. Read the full guide →

The long-standing craft of ranking higher in a list of blue links on Google or Bing. Still useful, but it optimizes for a page of choices, not for the single spoken answer a shopper now hears first. AEO vs GEO vs SEO →

Another name for the same idea as AEO: getting picked up by generative AI when it writes an answer. Some people separate the two, most use them interchangeably. If someone says GEO, they mean showing up inside AI-written responses.

When a shopper gets everything they need from the answer itself and never clicks through to a website. Great for the person asking, hard for a store that only measured success in site visits. In a zero-click world, the mention is the win, not the click.

Shopping that happens inside a back-and-forth chat rather than on a grid of product tiles. The buyer describes what they want in their own words, and the assistant narrows it down. It rewards stores whose facts are clear enough to survive a plain-language question.

Facts about your products written in a format machines can read cleanly: price, availability, brand, materials, dimensions. To a person it looks like an ordinary product page; underneath, structured data spells the same facts out so an engine never has to guess.

The shared vocabulary most structured data is written in, agreed on by the big search and AI companies. Using its Product type to label price, brand, and availability is one of the most direct ways to be readable to an answer engine.

Whether an AI's bots can actually reach and read your pages. A store can have perfect facts and still be invisible if its pages are slow, blocked, or built so the important text only appears after scripts run. If the crawler cannot read it, the answer cannot quote it.

A specific thing an AI recognizes as real and distinct: your brand, a product line, a material. When engines treat your store as a known entity rather than a stray string of words, they can connect facts to you with confidence.

The web of entities and the relationships between them that an AI leans on to reason. Your brand sits inside it linked to what you sell, where you ship, and what you are known for. The stronger and more consistent those links, the more surely you get named.

The same fact confirmed in more than one place. An engine trusts that your apron is organic linen far more when your page, a review, and a directory all agree. One claim in isolation is a maybe; several that line up become a fact the AI will repeat.

How current your published facts are. Prices change, items sell out, lines get retired. Answer engines favor sources that stay up to date, because nothing erodes trust faster than recommending something that is no longer for sale.

When an AI states something that is not true, like a price or a feature it invented. Clear, corroborated facts are the best defense: the more solid the real answer, the less room there is for the model to make one up about you.

The shopping experience inside ChatGPT, where the assistant suggests specific products in the flow of a conversation. For many sellers it is the first place they notice AI sending, or not sending, real buyers their way. Shopify & ChatGPT →

Google's AI-written summary that sits above the classic list of links, answering the question directly. A related mode, AI Mode, turns the whole search into a conversation. Both decide which sources to pull from, and being one of them is the goal.

An answer engine built around citations: it responds in prose and shows the sources it drew from. Because it names where each fact came from, it is one of the clearest places to see whether your store is being used as a source.

Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot are the assistants woven through the products people already use, from search to email to the desktop. Each can recommend products, so each is another surface where your store is either named or skipped.

The common way engines answer with current facts: before writing, they retrieve real sources, then generate a response grounded in what they found. It is why clean, readable, corroborated pages matter so much: they are what gets retrieved.

The moment an engine names or links your store as a source behind its answer. It is the clearest signal that you were not just readable but trusted enough to be quoted. Citations are the currency of AEO, the thing worth counting.

Tying an AI's answer to real, retrieved sources instead of only its training. A well-grounded answer points back at pages it can defend. The better your facts are published, the more often you are what an answer gets grounded in.

Shopping done by an AI agent acting for the buyer: it compares options, picks, and can even check out on their behalf. The person sets the goal, the agent does the legwork. Your store has to be legible to software, not just to people. Read the guide →

The agent itself: the piece of software that reads product facts, weighs them against what the buyer asked for, and makes a choice. It never sees your storefront's design. It reads your facts, so the facts have to stand on their own.

An open standard that lets AI assistants and agents connect to outside tools and data in a consistent way. Think of it as a shared plug: it is part of how an agent can reach a catalog, ask about stock, and act without a custom integration for every store.

A structured file of your catalog, kept current, that machines can read in one pass: titles, prices, availability, identifiers. Feeds have powered shopping channels for years; in agentic commerce they become one of the ways an agent takes in what you sell.

The global identifier on a product, the number behind its barcode. It lets an engine know your item and a competitor's are, or are not, the same thing. Clean identifiers help the AI match your exact product to the exact question.

How often you get named across a set of buyer questions, compared with everyone else answering the same ones. It is the AI-era version of share of voice: not where you rank, but how much of the answer is you.

The share of tracked questions where an engine actually cites your store. Watched over time, it tells you whether your visibility is climbing, holding, or slipping, one honest number instead of a hunch.

The list of real questions you track, the ones your buyers would actually type. A good prompt set reflects how people ask, from broad ("best gift for a new cook") to specific ("machine-washable linen apron"). It is the yardstick everything else is measured against.

Whether you show up at all for a given question, before you worry about how prominently. Presence is the first gate: you cannot be preferred by an answer you never appear in.

A snapshot of where you stand today, against your own past and against competitors, so progress is measured rather than guessed. Without one, "we're doing better with AI" is a feeling. With one, it is a number you can point to.

A single read on how ready your store is to be found and named by AI, built from the things engines actually check: readable facts, corroboration, freshness, and more. It is not a vanity number; each point ties to something you can fix. See the Score →

The way Beacon works, as one continuous cycle rather than a one-time report: Pull your catalog, Enrich the facts, Publish AI-readable pages, Track real citations, then start again as things change. How the platform works →

Filling the gaps in your catalog so an engine has enough to quote you with confidence: the missing material, the exact dimension, the care instruction. It is the difference between a page an AI skips and one it can build an answer from.

The AI-readable pages Beacon publishes for your products, laying your enriched facts out in the clean, structured form engines read best. Real pages that do work, not a report that tells you what to do and leaves you to it.

Beacon's way of shaping how your store meets an AI agent, the same care a good storefront gives a human visitor, aimed at the software doing the shopping. If the agent is the new customer, AUX is how you make it welcome. Read about AUX →