Glossary: Key RankScan Terms

This glossary explains the most important terms as they appear in RankScan.

Glossary #

• AI VisibilityAI Visibility describes whether and how visible a brand, website or person is in AI-generated answers. It measures mention, position, description and source linking across multiple platforms and prompts.Open glossary entry → visibility of a brand in the answers of AI assistants.
• Search VisibilitySearch visibility describes how present and findable a website is in the organic search results. It is not the same as traffic, but reflects theoretical findability.Open glossary entry → visibility in Google Search, measured by the positions of your keywordsA keyword is the search term users enter into a search engine to find information, products or providers. Keywords are the basis against which rankings and visibility are measured.Open glossary entry →.
• Website Health technical state of a website: crawlingCrawling is the process by which a search engine bot fetches a URL and downloads its content. It is the first step before a page can be indexed.Open glossary entry →, indexingIndexing is the step in which a search engine processes crawled content and decides whether a URL is added to the search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.Open glossary entry →, loading speed, links and structured dataSchema markup is code that describes a page's content in a structured way, so search engines understand it not just as text but as clearly classified information.Open glossary entry →. In the app the area is called “Website Health”.
• Score a value from 0 to 100 for AI, Search and Health. AI and Search measure you half against the leader and half against a fixed target.
• Leader the brand with the most points in an area.
• Property a website in one country and one language.
• Topic a thematic unit with a page, keywords and prompts.
• Prompt a question RankScan asks the AI assistants.
• AI assistant ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Copilot.
• Named an AI answer names the brand. Named early means in the first three sentences.
• Brand awareness answers to prompts with your brand name. They do not count towards the score.
• Share of voiceShare of Voice in AI answers measures the proportion of mentions a brand receives within a prompt set compared to competitors. It indicates the competitive position in AI answers.Open glossary entry → your share of all mentions in the competitive field. In the Looker Studio connector and the reporting APIAn application programming interface (API) is an interface through which software systems communicate and exchange data. It defines how requests are made and answered.Open glossary entry →.
• Source a web page an AI answer links to. Missing sources are cited pages that do not mention your brand.
• AI OverviewAn AI answer box is the summarized, directly formulated answer from an AI system that a user sees instead of a classic results list. Brands, products and source links may appear in it or be absent.Open glossary entry → a Google-generated AI answer in the search results.
• Access for AI assistants five checks of whether AI assistants can read your website.
• Measure a concrete task from your data, with affected pages and a way to check it.
• llms.txtllms.txt is a voluntary Markdown file in a website's root directory that gives language models a compact overview of important content. It is a proposal or de facto format, not a binding official web standard.Open glossary entry → a text file in the root directory for AI systems. So far no AI system is proven to read it.