- AI visibility
- A term used for at least four different measurements, and how to tell which one a report is actually giving you.
- Answer block
- A ready-made, sourced piece of an answer about a product, published with the use it is intended for.
- Answer influence
- Evidence that a published change caused an AI answer to change — the highest and hardest step of the evidence ladder.
- Canonical product record
- One authoritative, source-backed record of a product's identity and facts, published at a stable address — what it is and what it is not.
- Citation
- A URL that appears in an AI answer as a source — what it shows about the answer, and what it does not.
- Crawl
- A crawler's request for a URL — what it proves, and the much larger thing it is routinely mistaken for.
- Evidence ladder
- The ordered steps from a published page to an AI answer it influenced, and the rule that a higher step is never inferred from a lower one.
- Fact match
- An AI answer reproducing a specific, versioned, sourced value from a record — the step above citation on the evidence ladder.
- GS1 Digital Link
- A standard way to put GS1 identifiers such as a GTIN into a web address, so a barcode resolves to a page.
- GTIN
- Global Trade Item Number: the barcode number that identifies a trade item across sellers, and why AI needs it in the page itself.
- JSON-LD Product markup
- Structured data describing a product in the schema.org vocabulary, embedded in the page — useful, and no substitute for visible facts.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at a site's root that points language models to the site's key content — what it does and what it does not do.
- MPN
- Manufacturer Part Number: the maker's own identifier for a product, how it differs from a GTIN and a SKU.
- Official destination
- The seller's own page for the exact product, linked in an AI answer — the outcome that turns a mention into a visit.
- Product identity
- Which exact product a page, a listing or an AI answer refers to — and why it is the most common place AI answers go wrong.
- Product variant
- A version of a product that differs in one attribute — size, colour, capacity — and why variants are where AI answers most often mix facts.
- Provenance
- Where a product fact came from: the source page, the day it was read and a fingerprint of what was read.
- Retrieval
- A fetch made to answer a specific question — the step between a crawl and a citation that is hardest to observe.
- Supersession
- Replacing a product fact with a newer one while keeping the old one, with the dates each was valid.
- User agent
- The self-declared name a program sends with a request — why it identifies nothing on its own.
- Verified crawler
- A crawler request whose origin matched the provider's documented IP ranges or reverse DNS at the moment it arrived.
The rules that decide what each kind of evidence may be used to claim are at /evidence.