A plain-English glossary of the terms behind AI visibility for financial institutions. If you are new to how AI decides what to recommend, start here.
AI visibility
How discoverable and accurately represented your brand is inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. High AI visibility means the assistant can find you, understand what you do, and recommend you when a customer asks.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of structuring content and data so AI assistants can find, understand, and cite your brand. GEO is to AI answers what SEO was to search rankings.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Optimizing your content so it can be extracted as a direct answer to a question, rather than just ranked as a link. Clear question-and-answer structure is the core of AEO.
Entity coherence
How consistent your identity is across the web. When your name, role, offerings, and facts match everywhere an AI looks, the model trusts the entity and represents you correctly.
Machine legibility
How easily a machine can parse your site. Clean semantic markup, schema, labeled elements, and content that is not hidden behind scripts all make a site more legible to AI crawlers.
Agentic trust
The confidence an AI agent has that your brand is real, credible, and safe to recommend. It is built from consistent facts, third-party reinforcement, and a clean technical footprint.
Agentic readiness
How prepared your site is for AI agents that act on behalf of a user, not just answer questions. It measures whether an agent could find, understand, and use your information to complete a task.
AI citation rate
How often AI assistants name or link your brand when answering questions in your category. A rising citation rate is the clearest signal that your AI visibility is improving.
Want to see how your brand scores on these? Take the AI Visibility Self-Check.