AI Visibility
AI Visibility measures how often a brand appears when buyers ask category-relevant questions to AI assistants. Faro Index sends real buyer-intent queries to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, then records whether your company is mentioned, how prominently it is featured (primary recommendation versus passing reference), and on how many platforms it appears. The Visibility Score (0–100) combines mention frequency, prominence, and platform coverage. High visibility means AI recommends you during active vendor research. Low visibility means buyers may never hear your name when they ask AI for options.
Brand Accuracy Rate
Brand Accuracy Rate is the percentage of verifiable factual claims AI makes about your company that are actually correct. Faro Index extracts specific claims from AI responses—pricing, product names, leadership, founding date, category positioning—and compares each claim against your website and other trusted sources. A score of 100 means every checked claim matches your site. A score of 40 means most claims are wrong or outdated. This metric is distinct from visibility: AI can mention you often while stating incorrect facts confidently.
GEO Score
GEO Score (0–100) measures how AI-readable your website is. Faro Index crawls up to 50 pages per domain and scores schema markup coverage (JSON-LD or Microdata), content readability, answer block presence, and content depth. A high GEO score means AI can extract accurate facts directly from your site. A low GEO score usually means AI relies on third-party sources, which increases factual drift. GEO Score is the primary on-site signal in Faro Index’s accuracy audit (Pillar 2).
Content Leakage
Content leakage occurs when AI uses your company’s positioning, product descriptions, or factual claims in generated answers without attributing your website as the source. It also covers narrative misrepresentation: AI describes you incorrectly, confuses you with another entity, or frames your brand unfavorably. Faro Index detects leakage by analyzing raw AI responses for narrative alignment, competitor misassociation, negative signals, and unattributed overlap with your site content. The dashboard reports this as Leakage Protection (0–100), where higher means better protected.
Answer Block
An answer block is a 30–80 word declarative paragraph placed directly after the H1 on a web page, written to answer a specific buyer question in plain language. AI models and answer engines preferentially extract and quote these blocks because they match the format of the questions users ask. Pages without answer blocks are rarely cited verbatim. Adding answer blocks to homepage, pricing, product, and FAQ pages is one of the highest-impact GEO improvements Faro Index recommends after a scan.
Schema Markup (AI accuracy context)
Schema markup is structured data—usually JSON-LD in the page head—that labels entities and facts for machines: organization name, product type, FAQ entries, and contact details. For AI accuracy, schema matters because models and retrieval systems can read labeled facts without inferring them from prose. Faro Index’s crawler checks whether each page includes valid schema.org types. Sites with zero schema coverage often score poorly on GEO and show low brand accuracy because AI guesses from third-party sources instead of your site.
Disambiguation Content
Disambiguation content is explicit plain text on your website that states what your company is and what it is not, especially when your brand name overlaps with other products, technologies, or trademarks. AI models frequently conflate similar names—for example, confusing a SaaS brand with a hardware manufacturer or financial index. Effective disambiguation appears in the initial HTML (not behind JavaScript toggles), typically in the homepage opening paragraph, meta description, and H1. Faro Index flags missing disambiguation when AI responses show identity confusion.
Zero-Click Exposure
Zero-click exposure is the share of buyer queries where AI delivers a complete answer without the user needing to click through to a source website. When exposure is high, organic traffic can decline even if your brand is mentioned, because the research task is finished inside the AI interface. Faro Index estimates zero-click exposure from scan responses by analyzing whether AI answers fully satisfy the query without citing or requiring a visit to your domain. Available on paid plans alongside traffic correlation when Google Search Console is connected.
AI Citation
An AI citation is when a model attributes a claim or recommendation to a specific URL or named source in its response. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews show citations explicitly; ChatGPT and Claude may cite sources depending on mode and retrieval settings. Earning citations requires pages AI can parse—schema markup, answer blocks, and clear factual prose. Faro Index tracks cited URLs in scan responses so you can see which domains AI treats as evidence when describing your category.
Platform Summary
A platform summary aggregates scan results for one AI platform: how many queries were sent, how many mentioned your brand, which competitor names appeared alongside yours, and what framing or sentiment the model used. Comparing summaries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude shows where you are well represented versus underrepresented. A brand strong on Perplexity but absent on Claude indicates platform-specific gaps in content, citations, or category associations—not a single universal score.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring website content so generative AI systems can read, extract, and cite it accurately. GEO includes schema markup, readable prose, answer blocks, disambiguation content, and sufficient page depth. It differs from traditional SEO because the consumer is often an AI model retrieving facts at answer time, not only a human clicking a blue link. Faro Index’s GEO Score quantifies how well your site meets these requirements.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on winning direct answers in AI interfaces, voice assistants, and featured snippets. Where GEO covers overall AI-readability, AEO emphasizes concise, authoritative response blocks that models can quote verbatim when a user asks a specific question. Faro Index’s answer block audit identifies pages missing these blocks. Adding a targeted FAQ or HowTo section with schema often improves both AEO and Brand Accuracy Rate on the next scan.
Content Overlap
Content overlap measures how closely an AI-generated response mirrors language or facts from your website without citing your URL as the source. High overlap with no citation suggests AI absorbed your messaging from training data or retrieval context but did not attribute it—a form of content leakage. Faro Index reports content overlap as part of AI Search Impact on paid plans. Reducing uncited overlap typically requires stronger schema, clearer canonical pages, and third-party citations that point back to your domain.
Competitor Displacement
Competitor displacement occurs when AI recommends or cites a competitor for a query where your brand should appear based on your category and positioning. Faro Index identifies displacement by comparing mention patterns across buyer-intent queries: your brand absent while a named competitor is featured as the primary answer. High displacement correlates with lost AI share of voice and, on connected accounts, with declining organic clicks on category pages in Google Search Console.
Narrative Gap
A narrative gap is a topic or claim your company emphasizes on its website that AI models omit or contradict in their responses. Common gaps include core product capabilities, target customer segment, geographic focus, and competitive differentiation. Faro Index lists narrative gaps after comparing AI outputs to your crawled site copy. Closing gaps requires disambiguation content, schema, answer blocks, and sometimes third-party proof points that reinforce the claims you want AI to repeat.
