Glossary

Overview#

Definitions for the terms used across Seerly. Each entry says what a term means and how to read it, rather than how it is calculated, on the grounds that the second is rarely what you need at the moment you look something up.

Generative engine optimization (GEO): the practice this product exists to serve, which is being named in the answers AI assistants compose. It also travels under AEO and AIO, among others. See Generative Engine Optimization.

Measurement#

Prompt: one realistic buyer question that Seerly asks an AI engine on your behalf, such as "what's the best project management tool for a small agency?". Prompts stay fixed and are asked again each cycle, which is what makes results comparable across time rather than a series of unrelated snapshots.

Topic: a cluster of related demand that groups prompts together. Topics are what you approve during setup and what every metric in the product is reported against, which makes them the most consequential thing in your account.

Run: one complete pass of your prompt set across the engines you track. How often a run happens depends on your plan.

AI answer surface: any place where an AI system answers a question directly instead of returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview are the surfaces tracked on standard plans.

Scores on the Overview#

GEO Score: Seerly's composite of how discoverable your brand is to AI engines, on a 0 to 100 scale. Fed by AI Discovery Reach, your site's readiness from the page audit, and brand sentiment, with reach the biggest contributor. Comparable against your own history rather than against other companies, and its change badge measures against your previous completed run.

AI Discovery Reach: the share of prompt runs in your latest completed run where an AI engine mentioned your brand. A run is a single prompt on a single engine, and every successful run counts whether you appeared or not, so this tracks how often you surface rather than where you rank.

LLM Performance Index: the per-engine breakdown on the Overview, carrying a Visibility Index and a Sentiment Score for each engine, so one weak engine cannot hide inside a healthy average.

Influence Strength: how much weight a citation source carries in shaping answers about your category, used to rank Top Citations on the Overview.

Visibility#

Discovery Rank: your position among tracked competitors, normalised to a 1 to 10 scale, where lower is better. It runs in the opposite direction to most numbers in the product, so a move from 6 to 3 is an improvement. Because it is a position rather than a quantity, it can worsen in a week when nothing about your own presence changed, simply because a competitor improved.

Position: where inside an answer your brand appears. Being the first brand named carries considerably more weight than being the fifth of six alternatives listed at the end.

Share of Voice (SoV): your presence relative to your tracked competitors across the same prompts. Visibility asks whether you appear at all; share of voice asks whether you appear instead of your competitors, and the two can move in opposite directions in the same week.

Citations#

Citation: a source an AI engine referenced while answering. Citations matter because they shape what the answer says, which means influencing the sources is how you influence the answer.

Citation gap: a topic and engine pair where you are absent and something else is being cited in your place. A gap names both the absence and whatever is filling it, which is what makes it actionable rather than merely discouraging.

Recurrence: how many consecutive runs a source has continued to be cited across. A page cited once is noise; a page cited every run is the page you are genuinely competing with.

Sentiment#

Sentiment: whether AI answers describe your brand positively, neutrally or negatively. A large neutral share is the normal shape rather than a problem, because most factual mentions of a brand are neutral.

Aspect: the specific theme driving a sentiment judgement, such as pricing, support, quality or ease of use. Aspects are the layer you can actually act on, since nobody can fix "negative sentiment" while "negative on support response times" is a piece of work with an owner.

Where each term appears#

Most of these map to a particular screen. The GEO Score, AI Discovery Reach, the LLM Performance Index and Influence Strength live on the dashboard Overview. Discovery Rank, Share of Voice, Discovery Reach Trend and Weekly drivers all live on Insights → Visibility. Aspects live on Insights → Sentiment → Aspects. Citation gaps live on Insights → Gap Analysis, and clusters live on Insights → Keywords → Universe.

Site health#

Smart Audit: an analysis of your public pages covering how easily an AI engine can read, understand and cite them. It overlaps with a traditional SEO audit without asking the same question, and its actions include generated fixes and an llms.txt draft for your site.

Readiness check: a focused check on whether AI crawlers can reach your content at all, which is the prerequisite everything else on the site health side depends on.

Content#

Content credit: the unit consumed when you generate content. See seerly.app/pricing.

Brand Hub: where your brand voice, positioning and the terms you would rather avoid are stored, so that anything generated stays consistent with the rest of your material.

Limitations#

These are product definitions rather than industry ones, and the industry has not settled on much yet. Where a metric is expressed as a percentage, treat direction and relative comparison as the meaningful signal rather than the absolute figure, which rarely means anything on its own.