Glossary
Every metric and term, defined and calculated.
46 definitions covering what refd measures, how each number is calculated, and the conditions under which it stops being reliable. These are the same definitions the product uses, not a separate marketing description of them.
Metric
Visibility
- Mention rate
- The percentage of scored AI answers that name the tracked brand or competitor.
- Average position
- The average order in which the brand appears when it is mentioned. Position 1 means it was named first.
- Prompt result signals
- M is mention rate and C is citation rate for each AI surface. None means the answer was scored but contained neither signal.
Metric
Competition
- Share of voice
- Of all tracked brand mentions, the percentage that belongs to this brand or competitor.
- Share of voice gap
- Your brand's share of voice minus the strongest competitor's. A positive value means your brand is ahead.
- First named
- When a tracked brand is named first, the percentage of those answers led by this brand.
- Surface leaders
- The brand or competitor with the highest mention rate on each AI surface in the selected range.
Metric
Citations
- Citation rate
- The percentage of scored AI answers that cite a page from this brand or competitor.
- Attributed citations
- Citations that can be assigned to a recognizable domain. Opaque redirects are excluded.
- Brand URL citations
- The total number of times an exact page from your domain appeared as a cited source.
- Source gap
- Domains cited in answers where your brand was neither mentioned nor cited.
- Answers citing
- The number of distinct AI answers that cite at least one page from this domain.
- Citations
- The total cited URLs from this domain. One answer can contain more than one citation.
Metric
Answer analysis
- Sentiment
- How AI answers portray this brand or competitor when it is mentioned, as positive, neutral, and negative shares of classified mentions.
- Positive sentiment
- Of the answers that mention the brand, the percentage whose portrayal is classified as positive.
Metric
Changes
- Material change
- A movement large enough to outrank routine noise, measured between seven-day windows of runs rather than between two single runs: 5 points for mention and citation rates, 4 points for share of voice, 5 points for sentiment shares, and a quarter of a rank for average position.
Term
Tracking setup
- Workspace
- An isolated monitoring project for one brand and its competitive landscape.
- Brand
- The primary entity a workspace is created to monitor.
- Competitor
- A company or product tracked alongside the workspace brand for comparison.
- Tracked entity
- A brand or competitor that refd looks for in AI answers and citations.
- Prompt
- A question sent to each enabled AI surface during a collection run.
- Domain
- A website address assigned to a tracked entity for citation attribution.
- Alias
- An alternate name that should count as a mention of a tracked entity.
Term
AI answers
- AI surface
- An AI answer experience monitored as a separate data source.
- AI answer
- The response text and source list returned for one prompt on one AI surface in a run.
- Mention
- An occurrence of a tracked entity name or alias in the AI answer text.
- Citation
- A valid web source URL associated with an AI answer.
- Source
- A web page cited as supporting material for an AI answer.
- Cited domain
- The website hostname extracted from one or more cited source URLs.
- No AI Overview
- A valid Google search result in which Google did not show an AI Overview.
Term
Collection and scoring
- Run
- A collection batch covering the active prompts and enabled AI surfaces at a point in time.
- Run trigger
- The event that started a collection run.
- Collection unit
- One result for a specific prompt and AI surface within a run.
- Scoring
- The process that turns a collected answer into entity and citation signals.
- Raw answer payload
- The original provider response retained behind a scored collection unit.
Concept
Answer surfaces
- Answer engine
- A search product that returns a written answer instead of a list of links.
- Google AI Overview
- The AI-generated summary Google places above the classic result list for some queries.
- Google AI Mode
- Google's dedicated conversational search surface, separate from AI Overviews.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends without the user visiting any result, because the answer was given on the results page.
Concept
How AI answers work
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Fetching documents at question time and giving them to a language model to write its answer from.
- Grounding
- Tying an answer to retrieved sources so its claims can be traced rather than invented.
- Answer variance
- The tendency of an answer engine to give different answers to the same question.
- Hallucination
- A confident claim in an AI answer that no source supports.
Concept
Optimization practice
- Answer engine optimization
- The practice of trying to influence whether and how a brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- Generative engine optimization
- A near-synonym for answer engine optimization, usually abbreviated GEO.
- llms.txt
- A proposed file at a site's root that lists its documents in a form built for language models to read.
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