The AI visibility glossary for Shopify brands

GEO, AEO, LLMO, visibility score, share of voice: since ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews became product discovery channels, a new vocabulary has taken hold, often poorly defined, sometimes used interchangeably even though the terms cover different things. For a Shopify brand starting to pay attention to its AI visibility, sharing a common vocabulary with your team, your agency, or your tracking tools isn't a detail. It's what lets everyone know what they actually mean when they say "we're well cited."

The fundamentals: what are we talking about?

Generative AI refers to models that produce a natural-language answer instead of a list of links; that's what powers AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. AI visibility is the extent to which your brand and products appear, get recommended, or are accurately described in those answers, whether the query is about your brand directly (a branded query) or about a product category where you aren't named at the start (an unbranded query). The AI visibility score condenses that presence into a trackable metric over time, rather than a one-off impression.

The vocabulary of measurement

• AI citation: your brand or product being mentioned in an answer, with or without a link
• AI share of voice: the proportion of mentions that go to you rather than your competitors, on a given topic
• Average position: where your product shows up in the answer (named first, listed last, offered as an alternative)
• Brand sentiment: the tone, positive, neutral, or negative, the AI uses when it talks about you
• AI hallucination: false or outdated information the AI attaches to your brand, to be corrected like a catalog error

The vocabulary of optimization: GEO, AEO, LLMO

GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), and LLMO (large language model optimization) describe, with some nuance depending on who's using them, the same family of practices: making your catalog and content easier for AI to understand, cite, and recommend, similar to what SEO did for traditional search engines, but with different levers (structured product data, consistent information across the web, brand authority on third-party sources). For a Shopify brand, this optimization comes down concretely to the product page: its attributes, its description, and its markup are all signals AI uses to decide whether your product deserves to be recommended.

This glossary isn't fixed. AI visibility vocabulary evolves along with the engines themselves, and new terms will keep appearing as conversational commerce and AI shopping agents become mainstream. Tadow's MAP, FIX, PROVE approach starts from exactly this premise: to act on your AI visibility, you first have to name and measure it correctly, before fixing your catalog and then proving the impact in euros.