AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) The practice of optimizing a brand's digital presence so it appears in AI-generated answers, not just traditional search results.
How to think about it: Where SEO targets blue-link rankings, AEO targets citations and mentions inside responses from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
AI Citation Visit A bot visit that occurs when an AI platform such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity actively accesses a webpage to evaluate it as a potential source for answering a user question.
How to think about it: This is the equivalent of an impression in SEO terms, but instead of a human it’s a robot. They indicate that your content is under active consideration for inclusion in an AI-generated answer. Learn more about Traffic Analytics.
AI Visibility A measure of how often a brand appears when AI search engines respond tracked prompts.
How to think about it: Cognizo tracks AI visibility across prompts and surfaces it as a key metric. It reflects how well AI systems recognize, trust, and cite your brand in answers.
Audience A saved profile in Cognizo that defines a target reader segment including tone, persona, and context, applied to content generated in Content Studio.
How to think about it: Created once and reused across content briefs to ensure that AI-generated content is tailored to the right reader. Learn more about Audiences.
Brand A configured entity in Cognizo representing your business, built from your website, public sources, and user-generated content.
How to think about it: When you create a brand, Cognizo generates an industry profile and associates prompts, topics, competitors, and analytics with it.
Brand Mention When an AI provider mentions a brand by name in AI-generated responses
How to think about it: Brand mentions = visibility. Your brand was provided to a user as a solution to their query.
Brand Overview An AI-generated profile summarizing a brand's industry categorization, focus areas, and how it is currently described across online sources.
How to think about it: Shown immediately after brand creation, it acts as a discovery tool. If the overview over-indexes on one product or offering, it signals content gaps that AEO work can address.
Citation Citations are the sources AI models referenced when answering the prompts you track in Cognizo.
How to think about it: Being cited indicates that the AI has evaluated and selected your content as a relevant source. Citations are one of the clearest signals into how AI search actually works in your category. Learn more about Citations.
Competitive Gap Analysis A research tool that maps where competitors have AI visibility that your brand does not, and where your brand has visibility that competitors lack.
How to think about it: Enter up to five competitor domains and Cognizo shows visibility gaps in both directions. Prompts where competitors already have visibility signal validated demand, and the question becomes whether to compete for it. Learn more about Prompt Research.
Content Recommendations An audit tool within Cognizo's Optimizations suite that surfaces tailored suggestions for content to create, enhance, or promote in order to improve visibility in both traditional and AI-driven search.
How to think about it: Recommendations are broken into three types: Owned (content you build or optimize on your own website), Earned (opportunities to feature your content through media partnerships), and Social (strategies to strengthen AI search presence through social media). Each recommendation includes a title, reasoning, implementation guidance, and related prompts and citations. You can mark recommendations as completed to track progress and measure how your efforts translate into improved AI visibility.
Competitor Another business tracked alongside your brand within Cognizo to enable side-by-side visibility comparison across shared prompts.
How to think about it: Cognizo suggests competitors automatically and users can add more. Prompts then track both your brand and competitors so you can see where others are cited when you are not.
Content Brief A structured outline generated by Content Studio that defines the goal, structure, and key angles for a piece of content, grounded in Cognizo visibility data and competitive research.
How to think about it: It is the intermediate output between insight and article. Briefs are reviewed and edited before article generation, giving teams control over direction without starting from scratch.
Content Studio A Cognizo feature that turns visibility data and competitive intelligence into structured content briefs and full AI-drafted articles, designed to improve a brand's performance in AI search.
How to think about it: Users select a topic or tracked prompt, choose a writing style and audience, and Content Studio generates a research-backed brief. From the brief, a full article can be generated in one click.
Domain Research A research tool in Cognizo that surfaces the AI search prompts and user intents most relevant to any domain, whether your own or a competitor's.
How to think about it: It is the best starting point for teams new to AEO. Enter a domain and Cognizo surfaces the question clusters users are actively asking in AI search around that domain's category. Prompts can be added directly to active tracking. Learn more about Prompt Research.
Foundations Audit An audit that checks whether your core web assets including robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt allow major AI providers to properly find, crawl, and index your content.
How to think about it: It flags misconfigured or missing files that could block AI discovery and includes a Toolbox generator for creating an llms.txt file.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) A closely related discipline to AEO that focuses specifically on optimizing content so it is selected, summarized, and surfaced by generative AI systems in their responses.
How to think about it: While AEO is the broader strategic umbrella, GEO emphasizes the content and structural tactics such as clear formatting, authoritative sourcing, and direct answers to likely questions that make content more likely to be pulled into AI-generated outputs.
Indexing Visit A bot visit where a search engine or AI platform crawls and stores a page for future retrieval, determining whether that content is eligible to surface in future AI search results.
How to think about it: Pages that are not indexed cannot appear in AI search results, so monitoring indexing coverage helps identify content gaps before they become visibility gaps. Learn more about Traffic Analytics.
Keyword Research A research tool that translates existing SEO keywords into conversational AI search prompts, bridging traditional search strategy with AEO.
How to think about it: Built for teams with an established SEO foundation. Enter high-priority keywords and Cognizo reveals how users frame the same topics when querying AI platforms, which is often quite different from how they would type it into a search bar. Learn more about Prompt Research.
llms.txt A proposed web standard file that declares which AI crawlers are permitted to access a website's content, analogous to robots.txt but designed for large language model crawlers.
How to think about it: Not yet supported by major AI providers, but Cognizo recommends preparing one in advance. It can be generated using the Toolbox feature and is part of the Foundations Audit check.
Optimize A set of automated audits in Cognizo that evaluate your website's technical setup, content structure, and crawlability from the perspective of AI search engines.
How to think about it: Three audit types are available: Content Recommendations covering owned, earned, and social content opportunities; Foundations Audit checking robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt; and Site Audit reviewing markup, structured data, and semantic clarity.
Pitch Brand A temporary brand setup in Cognizo designed for agencies to model a prospective client's AI search visibility before a contract is signed.
How to think about it: Runs for 7 days to establish a baseline. At the end of the run, agencies can generate a shareable report, content recommendations, and a sample content brief and article, turning the data into sales conversation material.
Prompt A user-style question or query that Cognizo runs daily across supported AI platforms to measure how a brand appears in the responses.
How to think about it: Prompts are the atomic unit of Cognizo's tracking. Each one generates data on visibility, share of voice, sentiment, and citations. Prompts are grouped into topics and can be added manually, via CSV, or through suggestions.
Prompt Suggestions Platform-generated prompt recommendations based on industry trends, competitor activity, and your brand's topic structure.
How to think about it: Found in the Prompts module under the Suggestions tab. Volume estimates appear alongside suggestions. Some suggestions may not show volume data, which indicates Cognizo has identified a messaging opportunity even if broader user activity is still early.
Prompt Volume An estimate of how frequently users ask a given question (or questions with the same underlying intent) across AI search platforms, expressed as a range such as 10-500 or 1k-1.5k.
How to think about it: Volume is a demand signal only and does not affect visibility scores. It is updated monthly with a month-over-month delta so you can see whether demand behind a prompt is growing, stable, or declining.
Sentiment An assessment of how positively, neutrally, or negatively a brand is characterized within AI-generated responses that mention it.
How to think about it: Tracked per prompt alongside visibility and citation data. Negative or neutral sentiment in AI answers can signal messaging problems even when a brand is being cited frequently.
Share of Voice A metric showing what proportion of AI responses to a given prompt mention your brand versus competitors.
How to think about it: Tracked at the prompt level, it helps teams understand not just whether they appear, but how their presence compares to competitors within the same question space.
Site Audit An audit that reviews a website's markup, structured data, and descriptive text to ensure content is technically interpretable by both traditional search engines and AI crawlers.
How to think about it: It checks that pages include the right semantic and technical signals such as schema markup and clear headings so AI systems can accurately understand and classify the content they index.
Topic An organizational grouping of related prompts within Cognizo, used to structure tracking and reporting around a shared theme, product area, or business objective.
How to think about it: Topics can mirror product lines, funnel stages, audience segments, or seasonal cycles. Well-defined topics make it easier to spot trends and coverage gaps at a strategic level.
Traffic Analytics A Cognizo feature that identifies and categorizes non-human bot traffic visiting your website, specifically the AI crawlers and agents that influence how your brand appears in AI search results.
How to think about it: It tracks three types of bot visits: AI citations, training visits, and indexing visits. It requires a server-side integration via Cloudflare Workers, WordPress plugin, or custom middleware. Learn more about Traffic Analytics.
Training Visit A bot visit from an AI provider crawling your site as part of model development, collecting real-world content to improve the accuracy and coverage of its models.
How to think about it: Repeated training visits can influence how AI systems recognize and understand your brand over time, making them a longer-term visibility signal. Learn more about Traffic Analytics.