Citelift / glossary
The words, defined.
The terms this site uses, in plain language: the ones the industry argues about, the ones the vendors document, and the ones Citelift uses for its own work.
AI citationThe source an answer engine names or links for a claim in its reply. A citation carries a link and usually a fetch of the page; a mention is just your name in the text.AI crawlerA bot an AI company runs to fetch pages for training, for a search index, or on a user's behalf at answer time. Each vendor names its bots and says which robots.txt rules they respect.AI visibilityWhether, and how often, AI assistants name your brand when asked the buyer questions your category is judged on. It is measured by asking, never inferred from rankings.Answer engineA system that answers a question directly with retrieved sources instead of listing links: ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude with search.Answer engine optimizationShaping pages so an engine that returns one answer, such as Google AI Overviews, Perplexity or ChatGPT with search, can lift the answer from them and name the source.ClaudeBotAnthropic's crawler for collecting web content that could contribute to training its models. It is separate from Claude-SearchBot, which indexes pages for Claude's search results, and Claude-User, which fetches a page when a person asks Claude a question.Generative engine optimizationMaking your site the source an AI assistant retrieves and cites when it answers a buyer's question, rather than a result a person has to click.GPTBotChatGPT's crawler for collecting training data. It is distinct from OAI-SearchBot, which builds the search index behind ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page when a user asks for it.LLM SEOLLM SEO is the work of making a site easy for large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to find, read and cite when they answer a question. It is mostly another name for generative engine optimization.llms.txtA plain-text file at /llms.txt, proposed by llmstxt.org in September 2024, that lists a site's most useful pages for language models. Optional, unproven as a ranking factor, cheap to add.OAI-SearchBotChatGPT's search crawler. It surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, and ChatGPT's documentation says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.Order attributionCrediting an order to the article whose link the buyer followed, by UTM parameter or landing page, inside a fixed window. Citelift uses seven days and keeps the referrer separately.Product-linked articleAn article that answers one buyer question and links the two to five products that genuinely answer it, each link carrying the article's identifier so an order can be traced back to the post.Retrieval-augmented generationThe pattern behind cited answers: search first, read the best results, then write the reply with those sources in context. It is why a page must be fetchable, specific and quotable to be cited.Review holdCitelift's state for an article a merchant must approve before it publishes: chosen by the merchant for every article, or forced when a quality gate fails a second time.
Knowing the words is not the same as being named.
See whether ChatGPT names your store for three buyer questions in your category, which competitors it names instead, and which sources it cites. No sign-in needed.