AI Brand Mention
Your business being named in an AI answer, with or without a link. Worth tracking separately from traffic, because a mention can win the customer without ever producing a click.
Related terms
Generative AI
AI that produces something new — text, images, code, audio — rather than only classifying or predicting. The generative part is why it can write an answer about your business instead of just linking to it.
Answer Engine
An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are all answer engines. The old question was “do we rank?”; the new one is “are we the answer?”
AI Referral Traffic
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Usually small in number and unusually well-qualified, because they clicked after reading a recommendation.
BreadcrumbList Schema
Markup describing where a page sits in the site’s hierarchy. It helps both search engines and assistants understand that a page is a service under a category, not a stray document.
Unsupervised Learning
Training a model on unlabelled data and letting it find structure by itself — grouping similar customers, say, without being told what the groups are.
Rich Result
A search listing with something extra — stars, prices, an image, an FAQ dropdown. Rich results come from structured data, and they take up more of the screen than a plain blue link.