What does this glossary cover?
This glossary defines the AI search and local visibility terms Mindflow uses, in plain language. It runs in three parts: the terms we coined and label as ours, the industry vocabulary that has a page of its own for each entry, and an A to Z where every definition sits one click away.
Some of the terms below are ours. Search Visibility Share, Qualified Demand, X/12, the Work Ledger and the six-layer audit are Mindflow’s own vocabulary, not industry standard, and they are grouped separately for that reason. An agency that presents its house terms as established practice is doing something subtly dishonest, so we label ours.
Which of these terms are Mindflow’s own?
The entries in this section are Mindflow’s house vocabulary rather than industry standard. Each one names something in how we diagnose, measure or report, and each links to the page where it is defined in full. If a term below sounds like established practice, it is not one, it is ours.
Visibility Check
Our free diagnostic. Twelve real buying questions for your category, run across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, returned with your X/12 score and screenshots. No sales call attached. More →
Local Visibility Audit
A paid, client-owned diagnostic at $3,500–$7,500. Six-layer diagnosis, five named competitors, measurement baseline, prioritized 90-day roadmap. For a single location or focused scope. More →
Strategic Search and AI Visibility Assessment
The larger paid diagnostic at $7,500–$15,000+, covering the same six layers across multiple locations, contested or regulated markets. More →
Six-layer audit
The diagnostic structure: eligibility, AI-crawler access, extractability, entity stability, citation surfaces, and measurement baseline. Two of the six need genuine rebuilding for ecommerce rather than adapting. More →
Entity Integration Framework (EIF)
The five stages, run in order: Identity, Architecture, Retrieval, Measurement, Outcome. In owner language: name it, build it, get found, measure it, prove it. More →
Search Visibility Share
Category, comparison-roundup and review-surface presence measured against five competitors agreed at onboarding and held constant for the engagement. Reported at brand tier, and at SKU tier where a catalogue exists. The denominator never moves silently. More →
Qualified Demand
Enquiries that are plausibly real work, defined with the client at kickoff and then held constant. Spam and misdirected calls are excluded rather than counted, because an unfiltered call total is not a business metric. More →
AI Share of Answer (X/12)
Twelve real buying questions, run three times each, scored per surface and never blended. Reported as X/12 rather than a percentage, because twelve questions cannot honestly produce one. More →
Mention, recommendation, citation
Three different things, scored separately.
| Outcome | Definition |
|---|---|
| Mention | A mention is your name appearing. |
| Recommendation | A recommendation is the response putting you forward as an option. |
| Citation | A citation is your own domain named as a source. |
The headline X/12 counts recommendations only, and collapsing the three is the commonest way an AI-visibility number gets inflated. More →
Snapshot
A single measurement pass, labelled as such. Around one in ten surfaced domains differs between identical runs minutes apart, so one pass is a snapshot rather than a score. More →
Work Ledger
Every completed task, dated and specific enough that you could check it against your own site. It sits alongside the three numbers rather than substituting for them. More →
Mindflow Monthly
The monthly report: the three numbers, the Work Ledger, and a narrative in owner language that says plainly what did not move. More →
Geo-grid
Map-pack position measured point by point across a city rather than as a single average, because a city-level average hides the neighbourhoods where you are invisible. More →
Which terms come from the industry rather than from Mindflow?
The terms in this section come from the wider AI-search industry rather than from Mindflow. These are not ours. They are used across the industry, sometimes loosely and sometimes interchangeably when they should not be. Each has its own page.
- AI visibility →Whether AI assistants can find, verify and recommend your business at all.
- Share of Answer →The metric itself: what it measures and how it is scored.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) →Optimising to be the answer rather than a result.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) →The generative-search variant, and where the term is used loosely.
- AEO vs GEO →The two terms compared, including where they differ.
- AI search optimization →The umbrella practice across AI surfaces.
- LLM SEO →What changes when the reader is a language model.
- ChatGPT optimization →The platform-specific case, and its limits.
- Entity SEO →Making a business unambiguous to a machine.
- Semantic SEO →Meaning and relationships rather than keyword matching.
- AI visibility score →Why we do not publish one, and what the industry means by it.
What does the A to Z cover?
The A to Z is the full list, in alphabetical order, and every entry links to its own page. 28 terms, each with a plain definition, why it matters for a local business, the common misunderstanding, and something you can check yourself in five minutes.
- AI citations & grounding →When an AI answer attributes a claim to a source, and the difference between being mentioned and being the evidence.
- AI crawler →The bots that read the web on behalf of AI systems, and the ones your robots.txt may be blocking without your knowledge.
- Brand SERP →What appears when someone searches your business name, the page that decides deals you never hear about.
- E-E-A-T →Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust, a framework for assessing quality, not a score you can check.
- Entity (in search) →A thing a search or answer engine can be certain about, and the unit it actually reasons with.
- Geo-grid (map-grid) tracking →Measuring map position point by point across a city instead of pretending one number describes it.
- Google AI Overviews →The AI-generated summary above conventional results, and one of the three surfaces we count.
- Google Business Profile (GBP) →The single highest-consequence asset in local visibility, and the one with the slowest recovery path when it goes wrong.
- Google Verified →A badge with a narrower meaning than most people assume.
- Knowledge graph →The database of entities and their relationships that sits behind modern search.
- Knowledge panel →The information box about an entity that appears beside or above results, a symptom of recognition, not a lever.
- llms.txt →A proposed convention for telling AI systems how to read your site. Emerging, not established.
- Local Services Ads (LSA) →Pay-per-lead ads that sit above everything, including the map pack, a different product from ordinary search ads.
- NAP consistency →Name, address, phone, written identically everywhere. Boring, unglamorous, and one of the highest-return things you can fix.
- Query fan-out →One question becoming many behind the scenes, and why you are competing for questions nobody typed.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) →The architecture behind most AI answers that cite sources, and why your content being retrievable matters more than it being persuasive.
- Review gating (and why it's banned) →Asking how someone feels before deciding whether to ask for a review. It is prohibited, and the reason is worth understanding.
- Review recency (and the rough three-month rule) →How fresh your most recent reviews are, often more load-bearing than your total.
- Review velocity →The rate at which reviews arrive, and why steady beats a burst.
- Service-area business (SAB) →A business that travels to customers rather than serving them at a storefront, with its own set of profile rules.
- Structured data & schema markup →Machine-readable statements of fact added to a page, useful only when they agree with the page.
- The Google map pack →The three local results that sit above everything else, and the reason proximity sometimes beats quality.
- The Work Ledger →Our record of every completed task, dated. One of our own terms, not an industry one.
- What is a local citation? →Any online mention of your business name, address and phone, and yes, though not for the reason most people think.
- What is a topical map? →A structured plan of every page a site needs to be authoritative on a subject, not a content calendar.
- What is an Entity Home? →The one page an engine should treat as the authoritative source of truth about your business.
- What is cost per lead, and what's normal? →The number most owners quote, and the one most easily manipulated.
- Zero-click search →A search that ends without anyone visiting a website. Increasingly the normal case.
Rankings are never guaranteed. Anything we could not trace to a primary source is absent from this page, not estimated. The audit runs the same six layers described on the pricing page, and Share of Answer is scored quarterly.
Fair questions
Why separate your terms from industry terms?
Because presenting house vocabulary as established practice makes a methodology sound more standard than it is. If we invented a term, the page says we invented it.
Are AEO and GEO the same thing?
Used interchangeably by most of the industry, and there is a real distinction underneath. The comparison page covers where it actually matters.
Do you have an AI visibility score?
No, deliberately. Every black box in this category is a score, and a score is a number whose derivation the buyer cannot inspect. We publish X/12 with the full protocol instead.
See these numbers on your own business
A free Visibility Check returns your X/12 score across three surfaces, with the raw responses.
Get my free Visibility Check