Local SEO and AI-visibility terms, defined in plain English — useful for a quick client-facing explanation as much as for your own reference.
The practice of making a business's web presence easier for an AI model to find, understand, and recommend — the AI-era counterpart to SEO. The two overlap (clear, accurate, well-cited content helps both) but aren't identical, since a model generates an answer rather than ranking pages.
Whether — and how — a business gets named when someone asks an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) a question a real customer would ask, like "best electrician in Leeds." Separate from, and not predicted by, Google rank.
A mention of a business's name, address, and phone number on another website — a directory, review site, or local publication. Consistent citations are one of the signals that help both traditional search and AI models associate a business with a location and category.
Checking a business's Google ranking from many separate points spread across its service area, rather than one search from head office — because local rank genuinely varies by location, a single check from one point can be misleading.
The block of three map-linked business results Google shows above the regular organic listings for a local search, e.g. "plumber near me." Historically the most fought-over piece of local search real estate — AI-generated answers are a newer, separate battleground.
Asking an AI model the same question multiple times and taking the result most of the answers agree on, rather than trusting a single response. Model answers can vary slightly between identical asks; sampling several times gives a steadier read on whether a business is genuinely, reliably being recommended.
A business being named, by name, in an AI model's answer to a relevant question. The basic unit AI-visibility tracking measures — either a business is mentioned in a given check, or it isn't.
Across a set of AI-visibility checks, the proportion that resulted in a mention. Useful both per-business (how often is this client recommended) and in aggregate (what share of local businesses generally get recommended at all).
Short for Name, Address, Phone — how uniformly a business's basic details appear across the web. Inconsistent NAP data (an old address still listed somewhere, a misspelled business name) is a common, fixable reason a business is under-recognised by both search engines and AI models.
The specific list of questions used to check a business's AI visibility — generated from its category, city, and services (e.g. "best {category} in {city}", "who should I call for {service} in {city}"). Different prompt sets surface different competitors and different answers.
Regularly re-checking a business's search position for a set of terms, so changes over time — improvement, decline, a competitor overtaking — are visible instead of guessed at.
Search Engine Results Page — the page of results Google (or another search engine) returns for a given query. The traditional target of local SEO, distinct from what an AI assistant chooses to say when asked the same underlying question.
One complete pass of checking a business against its full prompt set across the AI models being tracked — the AI-visibility equivalent of a rank-tracking scan.