Resources
Glossary
Plain-English definitions for the measurements and terminology used in PaperHorse.
24 terms
A
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- The practice of making a business easier for answer engines to find, understand, and include when people ask relevant questions. It can include crawl access, clear website content, consistent business facts, and credible third-party sources.
- Action
- A specific action PaperHorse places in your action plan based on the measured findings. This is product guidance, not the same as an AI engine recommending your brand to a customer.
- Action plan
- The ordered set of prioritized actions PaperHorse creates from the findings in a measurement. It gives you a practical sequence of work instead of an undifferentiated checklist.
- AI engine
- An AI service that produces answers to user questions. PaperHorse currently checks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.
- AI search visibility
- A summary of how often and where a brand appears across a defined sample of AI-generated answers. The sample depends on the prompts, engines, locations, dates, and measurement settings used.
B
- Brand recall
- How consistently AI mentions and describes a brand when the question already names that brand. PaperHorse measures brand recall on branded questions and keeps it separate from organic discovery.
- Branded question
- A question that names your brand or one of its products. These questions help measure brand recall, description accuracy, and sentiment rather than whether AI surfaces your brand unaided.
C
- Citation
- An instance where an AI answer identifies a source that supports the response. A citation does not necessarily mention the source brand or include a clickable link.
G
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- An overlapping term focused on how businesses and their content appear in AI-generated responses. Some people use AEO and GEO interchangeably, while others use GEO specifically for generative systems.
M
- Mention
- An instance where an AI answer explicitly names a brand. A mention is not automatically a recommendation, citation, link, ranking, or referral.
- Mention rate
- The percentage of completed, non-branded tracked answers that explicitly mention your brand. Failed answers are not included in the calculation.
- Measurement run
- One execution of the tracked prompt set across the AI engines included in a plan. PaperHorse stores the resulting answers so they can be reviewed and compared over time.
N
- Non-branded question
- A question that describes what a customer needs without naming your brand. PaperHorse uses these questions to measure whether AI surfaces your business without being prompted by name.
O
- Organic discovery
- When AI surfaces your brand in response to a non-branded question. It measures discovery without assuming the customer already knows your name.
P
- Position when found
- The order in which your brand is named within a tracked answer when it appears. PaperHorse reports this separately from mention rate.
- Prompt
- The question PaperHorse sends to an AI engine. Prompts are based on the questions people ask when looking for a business like yours.
R
- Recommendation
- An instance where an AI answer presents a brand as a suitable choice. A brand can be mentioned without being recommended.
S
- Sentiment
- A classification of the language surrounding a brand mention as positive, neutral, or negative. PaperHorse measures brand sentiment separately from organic discovery.
- Share of voice (SOV)
- A brand's mention rate divided by the combined mention rates of that brand and the competitors measured in the same sample. It shows how observed mentions are distributed among those brands.
- Source URL
- The exact web address identified as a source in an AI answer. PaperHorse preserves cited URLs so you can inspect the pages behind the citation data.
T
- Theme
- A recurring subject in the tracked answers, such as pricing, durability, or customer service. One topic can produce answers containing several themes.
- Topic
- A group of prompts that represent the same buyer need or intent. PaperHorse can use multiple questions to examine one topic from different angles.
- Tracked answer
- A response stored from one AI engine for one prompt during a measurement run. PaperHorse keeps the complete answer so the metrics can be traced back to what the engine said.
V
- Visibility score
- A score from 0 to 100 equal to the percentage of completed, non-branded tracked answers that mention your brand. It summarizes a defined sample, not every answer an AI engine might produce.