Glossary

Collection

Prompt — a question Surfaced sends to the AI engines on your behalf. Tracked per language and per market, so one question can be several rows. Response (or answer) — one reply from one engine to one prompt at one moment. The unit everything is counted over. Tracking run — one scheduled pass that asks every tracked prompt of every tracked platform. Observation — an internal name for a stored response. You will see it in counts such as “sampled observations”. Citation — an external link an engine included as a source in an answer. Counted once per answer per URL. Platform / engine — an AI assistant Surfaced asks, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI answers.

Measurement

Brand visibility — the share of answers that named or linked you. Full definition. Citation rate — among answers that cited any source, the share citing your domain. Full definition. Citation share — among all answers, the share that cited anything at all. A property of the platforms, not of you. Share of voice — your mentions as a proportion of all brand mentions in the comparison set. Full definition. Rival share — share of voice measured against your pinned competitors only. Average position — your average rank in answers that ranked options. Lower is better. Full definition. Sentiment — how favourably the mentioning answers describe you, 0–100. Full definition. Branded / unbranded prompt — whether the question contains your brand name. They measure different things and are reported separately. Why it matters.

Findings and work

Gap — something the answers get wrong, leave out, or credit to a competitor. Gap trends. Locked gap — a gap found only on platforms you do not track. Shown as a teaser and excluded from every count. Severity — critical, high, medium or low. Status — new, reviewed, actioned or dismissed. The last two are terminal and together are called addressed. Action — an item in the single work queue on Actions, with an owner and a status. Audit score — how ready your website is to be read and cited, 0–100. Full definition.

Content

Brief — the instruction for a piece of content before it is written. Briefs. Article — a piece of content in your library, at whatever stage. Articles. Checker — an automated quality gate run on a draft before it can be published.

Structure

Organization — the billing entity. One organization can hold several workspaces. Workspace — one brand being tracked, with its own prompts, competitors, members and settings. The unit of separation. Member — a person with a role in a workspace. The same person can belong to several. Role — what a member may do: owner, manager, editor, reviewer or viewer. Members and roles. Market — the country a prompt is asked from. Language — the language it is asked in. They vary independently. Markets and languages.