Every term, decoded.
Every term you'll see on this site and in the product. Written plainly, with examples.
· · 25 terms
Answer Engine Optimization. Optimizing content so LLM-based answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) can parse, cite, and recommend your brand. A sibling of SEO, not a replacement.
One AI job inside Cyte: reading a page, asking one AI engine one prompt, comparing two pages, or drafting a suggested improvement. Cyte runs thousands of them for every customer, around the clock. Agents watch, compare and suggest; they do not do the marketing.
Finding information by asking an LLM or generative answer engine such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini, instead of scanning a page of links. Also called answer engines or generative search.
A 0–100 score per prompt per AI engine, for you and for each competitor. Formula: base 35 for being mentioned, plus position bonus (up to +28 for #1), frequency bonus (up to +18), and sentiment adjustment (+12, +3 or −8). Capped at 100. See the Methodology page for the full math.
Connecting your own LLM API keys (OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok) to Cyte. Questions run through your keys, on your rate limits, and you pay the provider directly for that usage. On Agency, own keys let every client’s 50 most important prompts run daily. Keys encrypted at rest, revocable anytime.
A URL referenced by an LLM in its response. Cyte tracks every citation across every run. We classify each one — Editorial, UGC, Corporate, Competitor, or Uncategorized — based on the source domain.
Cited source from an editorial publication (Forbes, TechCrunch, The Verge, etc). High-trust content LLMs rely on heavily for recommendations.
User-generated content sources (Reddit, Quora, Hacker News). Increasingly cited by Perplexity and ChatGPT — almost half of Perplexity’s top citations come from Reddit alone.
Cited source from the brand’s own domain or owned properties. Signals that the brand is telling its own story effectively.
Cited source from a competitor’s domain. Useful signal for gap analysis — if competitors are cited but you aren’t, that’s an opportunity.
A short working document attached to an idea: the objective, the target page, what it must include, and a checklist. An outline for your team to write from — Cyte does not generate the content.
The ranked list of what competitors changed on their websites. Noise is filtered out; the default view shows the few changes that matter, such as pricing, positioning, new comparison pages, or a push into a topic you don’t cover.
Cyte’s reading of why one competitor shows up ahead of you in AI answers, written from the answers and both websites, with its evidence shown and a confidence level.
A specific AI query where your brand is absent, losing, declining, or a new opportunity. Each gap is classified and prioritized by math — competitor lead plus type-specific urgency boosts.
Generative Engine Optimization. Synonym for AEO. Used more often in North American circles.
LLM Optimization. Broadest umbrella term, overlaps significantly with AEO and GEO.
A geographic region your prompts get run against (worldwide, country, city). Cyte supports 12 geographic markets at launch, injecting them as natural-language suffixes to your prompts.
Extra points added to your Cyte score based on where you appear in a ranked list. Position #1 earns +28, #2 earns +22, #3 earns +17, #4 earns +13, #5 earns +9, and anything lower earns +4.
A single query Cyte tracks. The same query run against every supported LLM still counts as one prompt — we run it across all of them and aggregate.
After you mark an idea as done, Cyte re-checks the related prompts at 7, 14, 28 and 42 days and shows whether your score moved beyond its normal variation. Reported as an observation with a confidence level, not as proof.
One execution of your tracked prompts against every supported AI engine. Custom prompts run weekly on every plan; on Pro, up to 50 of them run daily. The comparison ranking runs weekly on Core and daily on Plus and above.
An adjustment to your Cyte score based on how the AI engine describes you. Positive framing (+12), mixed (+3), neutral (0), negative (−8).
Your brand’s share of total mentions across a prompt set, relative to competitors. Measured as a percentage.
Which topics each site has pages on. Cyte maps every topic across your site and each competitor’s, including the topics competitors cover and you don’t, with a verdict on whether each is worth pursuing.
The top-level container for your team, projects, billing, and settings. One workspace per company. Agency customers can run multiple client projects inside a single workspace.