Glossary
Every term you'll meet in Spotlit, in one plain sentence each.
3 min readChecked against the app 1 Oct 2026 What you'll get from this page
- Look up any label you see in the app.
- Tell similar-sounding numbers apart.
| Term | Meaning |
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| AI answer | What Spotlit's AI model wrote for one question in one scan, from a live web search. |
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| Spotlit AI · live web search | The label for our engine. It is not ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Google AI Overviews. |
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| Prompt | A buyer question we ask AI, such as “best email tool for small shops”. Also called a buying question. |
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| Buying question | A prompt that asks for a recommendation without naming any brand. |
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| Brand question | The one prompt about your brand by name. Always included, and left out of the visibility score. |
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| Question type | The kind of prompt: Discovery, Audience, Use case, Problem, Comparison, Alternatives, Your brand or Your questions. |
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| Topics | The question types, used to group prompts on Prompts. |
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| Run | One answer to one prompt. A scan produces several runs. |
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| Market | The country the search leans to and the language the answer is written in. |
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| Locked questions | After a site's first scan, its questions and market stay the same so later scans compare fairly. |
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| Term | Meaning |
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| Mention | An answer names your brand somewhere in its text. |
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| Position | Your place when an answer lists brands. #1 means named first. |
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| Average position | Your mean place across the answers that ranked you. Lower is better. |
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| Visibility rate | The share of answers that named you, from 0 to 100%. |
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| Visibility score | A 0–100 summary of one scan that also rewards being named near the top. |
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| Share of voice | Your share of all brand mentions in the answers. |
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| Blind spot | A prompt where no answer named you. |
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| Found in answers | A brand you didn't list as a competitor, but that the answers ranked at least twice. |
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| Visibility map | A chart placing brands by how often they're named and how often they're in the top 3. |
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| AI Radar | A chart where brands named more often sit closer to the centre. |
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| Run-to-run spread | How much results vary when the same question is asked several times. |
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| Term | Meaning |
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| Source | A web page an answer was built from. |
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| Citation | One use of a page as a source in an answer. Not a click, and not always a link to you. |
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| Citation share | A brand's own website's share of all citations. |
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| Your citation rank | Where your own site ranks among all cited sites. |
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| Gap | A cited site that isn't yours or a rival's and doesn't mention you yet. |
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| Gap score | 0–100: how much a gap matters, mostly from how often it's cited and partly from how many prompts use it. |
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| Kind of site | Review site, Community, List / comparison, Reference, Other website, Competitor site or Your site. |
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| Term | Meaning |
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| Recommendation | A suggested change, ranked by likely impact, with a draft. |
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| Worklist | The recommendations you chose to do. |
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| Fix result | The before-and-after record saved when you mark a fix done. |
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| Fan-out | The short web searches an AI assistant runs before it answers. |
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| Predicted | Made by our AI model as an estimate, not captured from an AI app. |
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| AI crawler | A bot an AI company uses to fetch web pages. Grouped as search, user or training crawlers. |
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| robots.txt | A file on your site that tells crawlers what they may read. |
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| llms.txt | An optional file that summarises your site for AI tools. Not a proven ranking lever. |
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| Structured data (JSON-LD) | Code that labels a page's content for machines, for example as a product or FAQ. |
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| Site check | A check, run on its own after every scan, of whether AI crawlers can reach your site and your pages are readable. A result is kept for 7 days. |
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| Readiness score | 0–100 per page: how easily AI can read it. 70+ is Ready. |
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| Term | Meaning |
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| Scan | One full run of all a brand's prompts. Counts toward your monthly limit. |
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| Tracking | Automatic re-scans of a brand about once a week. |
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| Re-scan | A scan run by tracking, with the same locked questions. |
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| Brand | A website you scan. Every app page shows one brand at a time. |
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| Fair use | The free plan's limit of 20 scans a month, re-scans included. |
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