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GenRank introduces concepts that may be unfamiliar if you are coming from a traditional SEO background. This page explains the most important terms and the ideas behind them. Understanding these concepts will help you interpret your data accurately and make better decisions about where to focus your efforts.
In GenRank, a prompt is the exact question or instruction sent to ChatGPT on your behalf. It is the unit of measurement everything else is built around.A prompt is not a keyword. Keywords are short, fragmented search terms designed for search engine ranking algorithms — “project management software,” “best CRM.” A prompt is a natural, conversational question that reflects how a person actually talks to an AI tool:
“What is the best project management software for a startup with a remote team?”
This distinction matters because AI models respond to natural language, not keyword strings. A prompt written to reflect real conversational behavior produces data that accurately reflects how your brand appears in genuine user interactions.Every metric in GenRank — brand visibility, competitor share, perception — is calculated from responses to specific prompts you have defined and chosen to track. The quality and relevance of your prompt set directly determines the quality of your data.Prompts can be categorized by intent:
  • Discovery — “What tools exist for managing social media?”
  • Comparison — “What is the difference between Notion and Asana?”
  • Transactional — “Which accounting software should I choose for a freelance business?”
  • Branded — “Tell me about [your brand name] and what it does.”
These three acronyms describe different optimization strategies for different discovery channels.SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving your content and technical infrastructure to rank higher in traditional search engines like Google. SEO measures rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates. Success means appearing in a list of ranked links.GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving how AI tools like ChatGPT represent and recommend your brand. GEO measures brand mentions, citations, share of voice, and entity clarity within AI-generated responses. Success means being included — accurately and favorably — in AI answers to queries relevant to your category.AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) targets a middle layer: featured snippets, AI Overviews in Google, and voice search results. AEO operates within traditional search infrastructure. GEO operates in standalone AI tools that function independently from search engines.
SEOAEOGEO
PlatformGoogle, BingGoogle AI Overviews, voice searchChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity
MetricRankings, clicksFeatured snippet presenceBrand mentions, share of voice
Content goalRank for keywordsAnswer direct questions conciselyBecome a citation-worthy source
GEO does not replace SEO — both serve different purposes and share some foundations, including content quality, authority signals, and technical accessibility. GenRank focuses specifically on GEO measurement for ChatGPT.
GenRank currently tracks ChatGPT, which holds the largest share of AI tool usage globally. Support for tracking additional LLMs is on the roadmap.
Brand visibility is a measure of how often your brand is mentioned in ChatGPT responses across your tracked prompt set.When GenRank runs your prompts daily, it captures the full text of each response and checks whether your brand name appears. Visibility is expressed as a percentage — the proportion of your tracked prompts where a mention was detected.A prompt-level view shows exactly which individual prompts include your brand and which do not. Prompts where your brand is absent are called prompt gaps — they represent queries where other brands are being recommended instead of yours.Brand visibility is the foundational metric in GenRank. All paid plans include it. The Free plan provides brand visibility tracking for up to 10 prompts.
Share of voice measures your brand’s mention frequency relative to your tracked competitors across the same set of prompts.If five brands are mentioned across your tracked prompt set and your brand accounts for 30% of all mentions, your share of voice is 30%. A competitor with 50% of mentions is being recommended more consistently by ChatGPT for queries in your category.Share of voice gives you a competitive frame for your visibility data. A high absolute visibility score (your brand mentioned in many prompts) can still represent a weak position if competitors are present in nearly every response.Competitor tracking is available on the Essential plan and above.
In the context of AI language models, an entity is a distinct, named concept the model can recognize and resolve — a company, product, person, or place. When ChatGPT processes a prompt about your brand, it needs to identify your brand as a specific, unambiguous entity with consistent properties.Entity clarity is a measure of how consistently and accurately ChatGPT resolves your brand. If your brand name appears in different forms across your content — abbreviated, misspelled, or easily confused with another brand — the model may associate your brand with fragmented or contradictory information. This weakens how reliably you are recognized and recommended.Strong entity clarity means:
  • Your brand name appears in a consistent, canonical form across your content and external sources.
  • ChatGPT resolves your brand to the correct entity without conflating it with competitors or similar names.
  • Your brand is referenced clearly and repeatedly across AI responses.
GenRank’s Entity Clarity tool monitors naming consistency, variation frequency, and fragmentation across captured responses. It is available on the Pro plan.
A project in GenRank is a tracking configuration for a single brand and domain. Each project has its own prompt set, competitor list, and visibility data.You use multiple projects when you need to track separate brands — for example, if you manage a portfolio of clients or run multiple product brands under one account.The number of projects you can create depends on your plan:
  • Free and Essential: 1 project
  • Pro: 3 projects
  • Scale: custom
All prompts, competitor data, and optimization insights are scoped to the project they belong to. Switching between projects gives you separate dashboards for each brand.
A prompt slot is one tracked prompt in your project. Your plan determines the maximum number of prompt slots you can use.Every day, GenRank runs each prompt in your slot allocation through ChatGPT and captures the response. The number of prompt slots directly limits how many distinct queries you can monitor.Plan limits:
  • Free: 10 prompt slots
  • Essential: 25 prompt slots
  • Pro: 150 prompt slots
  • Scale: custom
Prompt slots are shared across all active prompts in a project. If you are on the Pro plan with 3 projects, you have 150 slots total to distribute across those projects.
Start with fewer, high-intent prompts and expand as you learn which prompt categories produce the most useful signal. A focused set of well-chosen prompts delivers more actionable data than a large set of loosely relevant ones.
The daily refresh is the cycle in which GenRank re-runs all your tracked prompts through ChatGPT and captures fresh responses.Because ChatGPT generates responses dynamically — and because it can access real-time web content — the brands mentioned in responses to any given prompt can change over time. A daily refresh ensures your visibility data reflects current AI behavior rather than a static snapshot.Key implications of the daily refresh:
  • Visibility scores are updated every 24 hours.
  • Changes caused by new content you publish, PR coverage, or competitor activity become detectable within days.
  • Historical data accumulates over time, allowing you to identify trends, validate optimization efforts, and detect when visibility shifts.
All GenRank plans include daily refresh.
When ChatGPT performs a web search before generating a response, it may cite external sources — domains and pages it retrieved to inform its answer. GenRank logs these citations.Sources tracking shows you:
  • Which external domains are cited in responses to your tracked prompts.
  • How frequently each domain appears.
  • Whether your own domain is being cited.
  • Which domains support competitor mentions and which support yours.
Citations matter because they reflect the content that AI considers credible and relevant for queries in your category. If a competitor’s domain is consistently cited while yours is not, that is a signal about content authority and retrieval alignment — not just a visibility gap.Sources data is available on the Essential plan and above. The Content Retrieval tool in Optimization (Pro plan) provides deeper analysis of what elements make cited pages retrievable.
Brand perception in GenRank refers to the recurring qualities, themes, and attributes that ChatGPT associates with your brand across responses.AI language models attach patterns to named entities based on the content they have processed and retrieved. These patterns shape how a brand is described — reliably, at scale — to anyone who asks. GenRank extracts and quantifies those attributes so you can see how your brand is actually positioned in AI-generated descriptions, not just whether it is mentioned.Examples of perception attributes might include terms like “affordable,” “enterprise-grade,” “easy to use,” “for small businesses,” or “complex setup.” You can compare how your brand’s attributes differ from competitors’ in the same responses.Brand perception is available on the Essential plan and above.

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Putting the concepts together

A typical GenRank workflow moves through three stages that build on each other:
  1. Define prompts (Prompt Research) — Identify which queries your customers ask ChatGPT in your category. These become the inputs for all measurement.
  2. Measure performance (Response Tracking) — Track your brand visibility, share of voice, competitor positions, perception, and source citations across those prompts, updated daily.
  3. Improve results (Optimization) — Use content retrieval analysis and entity clarity monitoring to understand the structural reasons behind your visibility and make targeted changes.

Quick Start

Follow the step-by-step guide to set up your first project and prompts.

Prompt Research

Learn how to build and manage your prompt library.