Know the Terms.
Skip the Jargon.

AI Share of Voice measures the percentage of AI-generated recommendations that mention your brand versus competitors. Traditional share of voice tracked media mentions and ad impressions. AI Share of Voice tracks who gets recommended when real people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI platforms for help.

Unlike traditional market share metrics, AI Share of Voice shifts quickly. A competitor can gain visibility in weeks by improving their entity signals, structured data, and content authority. You can lose it just as fast if your online presence falls behind.

AI Visibility measures your AI Share of Voice across 7 platforms using persona-based testing. You see exactly where you rank, who outranks you, and what to change. Scout explains the gaps in plain English.

AI Visibility measures your presence in AI-generated answers. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google Gemini for recommendations, does your business appear? Are you named directly, described indirectly, or completely absent?

Traditional search rankings still matter. But discovery is fragmenting. Some customers search Google. Some ask ChatGPT. Some do both. You need to show up in all of them.

Scout tests AI Visibility across 7 platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, Grok, and DeepSeek. Site Audit handles your SEO. AI Visibility handles your AI visibility. Scout reads both and tells you what to fix first.

A webmaster used to be a real job title: the person who kept a business's website running, fixed what broke, added new pages, and made sure it stayed current. Most small businesses stopped having one years ago. Sites went stale because nobody had the time or the budget to maintain them properly.

An AI Webmaster is that same job, done by an agent instead of a person. It rebuilds the site from your business's real information, hosts it, monitors it for problems, and makes updates when you ask. You describe a change in plain English instead of opening a page builder. The agent does the work; a human checks it before anything ships.

Surmado Sites is an AI Webmaster: your rebuild is free, a human verifies it, and most sites are ready within 24 hours. See pricing for what's included.

An AI-managed website is different from a site you built with an AI tool. With an AI website builder, the AI generates the first draft and then hands you the keys: you're still the one hosting it, updating it, and fixing it when something breaks. With an AI-managed website, the AI service keeps doing that work after launch. Hosting, monitoring, content updates, and technical fixes stay with the service, not the owner.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most small business websites don't fail at launch. They fail a year later, when the person who built it has moved on and nobody notices the contact form stopped working or the pricing page is out of date. A managed site is built to not go stale, because someone (or something) is still watching it.

Surmado Sites is an AI-managed website: it rebuilds, hosts, and monitors your site continuously, and a human checks every change before it goes live. The rebuild is free and most sites are ready within 24 hours.

Answer Engine Optimization focuses on being the answer, not just ranking in results. When AI platforms generate responses, they pull from sources they trust. AEO means structuring your content, building your authority, and establishing your entity so AI platforms cite you.

This includes structured data, authoritative backlinks, consistent NAP information, and content that directly answers common questions.

Traditional SEO and AEO work together. Site Audit audits your technical SEO foundation. AI Visibility tests whether that foundation translates into AI visibility. Scout explains which fixes matter most.

ChatGPT-User is a separate OpenAI agent from GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot. It fires when a live ChatGPT user's action needs a specific page fetched right then, such as opening a link the user pasted in or a plugin retrieving a page on their behalf. It doesn't crawl the web on its own, and it isn't used to train models or build the search index.

In its December 2025 documentation revision, OpenAI clarified that robots.txt is not a reliable way to block these on-demand, user-initiated fetches, since they're treated more like a real person's browser requesting a page than a bot crawling the site. If you need a page never to be fetched this way, robots.txt alone won't do it; the page needs to be unreachable outright. Which AI bots should your website allow explains how ChatGPT-User differs from GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot.

Claude-SearchBot is the crawler Anthropic uses to index web pages so Claude can surface and cite them in search-enabled answers. It's separate from ClaudeBot, which trains Claude's underlying models. Like ClaudeBot, it honors robots.txt, so it will respect a disallow rule.

Anthropic has said directly that blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce your visibility in Claude's search results, so this is the bot to leave open if being found through Claude matters to your business, even if you choose to block ClaudeBot for training. Which AI bots should your website allow has the full breakdown. AI Visibility shows whether Claude and other AI platforms are actually recommending you.

Claude-User is the agent Anthropic uses when someone using Claude asks it to look at a specific page or site right now, similar in purpose to OpenAI's ChatGPT-User. It's not a crawler building an index and it's not used to train models; it's a live, on-demand fetch tied to a single user action.

Unlike some other vendors' user-fetch agents, Claude-User honors robots.txt, so a standard disallow rule actually blocks it. That makes it more predictable to manage than ChatGPT-User, which OpenAI has said robots.txt can't reliably control. Which AI bots should your website allow compares how the major AI platforms handle this.

ClaudeBot is the crawler Anthropic uses to collect web content for training Claude. Like OpenAI's GPTBot, it's a training crawler, not the one that determines whether Claude cites or links your site in a search-enabled answer; that's a separate crawler, Claude-SearchBot. ClaudeBot honors robots.txt, so a standard disallow rule keeps your content out of it.

The decision to block ClaudeBot is really a decision about training, not about visibility in Claude's answers. A business that wants to stay out of AI training data but still be found by Claude can block ClaudeBot while leaving Claude-SearchBot alone. Which AI bots should your website allow covers the distinction bot by bot, and AI Visibility tests whether Claude and other platforms actually recommend you.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) attaches a digital signature to each outgoing email, generated with a private key your email provider controls and verified with a matching public key published in your domain's DNS. If the signature checks out, the receiving server knows the message wasn't tampered with in transit and genuinely came from a server authorized by your domain. It solves a different problem than SPF: SPF checks who's allowed to send, DKIM checks whether what arrived is what was actually sent.

DKIM is set up and rotated on your email provider's side, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, your marketing platform, not through a single record you can eyeball the way you can with SPF or DMARC. Surmado's free Website Health Check tests your SPF and DMARC records; DKIM has to be checked in your email provider's admin console, since the signing key and selector are specific to that provider. If you've never set up DKIM, start there: missing DKIM is a common reason legitimate email ends up in spam.

DMARC is a DNS TXT record, published at _dmarc.yourdomain.com, that sets policy for what happens when an email claiming to be from your domain fails SPF or DKIM. The policy can be none (do nothing, just report), quarantine (send to spam), or reject (block outright). When the record includes a reporting address (the rua tag), it also tells other mail servers where to send aggregate reports, so you can see who's sending mail as your domain, including anyone spoofing it.

Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require anyone sending bulk email to their users to have SPF, DKIM, and a DMARC record in place, which made DMARC effectively mandatory rather than optional for most senders. A domain with no DMARC record at all is worse than one set to "none": with no record, you get no policy and no reports, so impersonation of your domain happens without you ever finding out. The Website Health Check checks whether your DMARC record exists and is valid; if customers report your emails going to spam, why emails don't arrive walks through the likely causes.

Generative Engine Optimization makes your business visible to generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on search engine rankings, GEO focuses on entity recognition. AI platforms need to know who you are, what you do, and why you're credible before they recommend you.

GEO includes directory listings, structured data, consistent business information, authoritative mentions, and content that establishes expertise.

GEO and SEO reinforce each other. Strong SEO builds the foundation. Strong GEO extends your reach into AI discovery. AI Visibility measures your GEO effectiveness across 7 AI platforms.

Ghost Influence is a Surmado metric for when AI describes what your business does, but credits a competitor or no one at all. The customer is in the conversation. The recommendation isn't yours.

Example: an AI is asked for a good Mexican restaurant in San Diego with safe celiac options. It describes a place with handmade corn tortillas, a separate fryer, and a bilingual menu. It doesn't name El Tianguis. That's Ghost Influence. The brand is shaping the answer without owning it.

High Ghost Influence means you're close. The attributes AI is echoing are yours. Attaching the name to them is usually a smaller fix than people expect.

Low Ghost Influence is a different problem. AI doesn't know enough about you to describe you, even by accident.

Ghost Influence requires at least one organic mention to calculate. Until then, it's measured as N/A. That's not a flaw. It's the metric being honest about what it can and can't see yet.

Read the deep dive →

Google-Extended isn't its own crawler the way GPTBot or ClaudeBot are. It's a token you add to robots.txt that tells Google whether your content can be used to train Gemini models and to ground Gemini's responses, separately from Googlebot, which handles ordinary Search crawling and indexing. Your content is still fetched by Google's existing crawl infrastructure; Google-Extended just controls what that content is allowed to be used for.

Google is explicit that adding Google-Extended does not affect a site's inclusion or ranking in Google Search, and AI Overviews draw on the regular Googlebot-built Search index rather than being gated by this control. Blocking Google-Extended is a decision about Gemini training and grounding, not about whether you show up in Google Search or AI Overviews. Which AI bots should your website allow covers how Google-Extended fits alongside GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. AI Visibility tests whether Gemini and other AI platforms recommend your business.

GPTBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to collect content from the web for training its models. It's separate from the crawler that powers ChatGPT's search results, so what GPTBot does has nothing to do with whether you show up when someone asks ChatGPT a question. Blocking GPTBot in robots.txt keeps your content out of future training runs; it does not remove you from ChatGPT, and it does not stop ChatGPT from citing or linking your site today.

The mistake we see most is blocking every OpenAI bot at once out of caution, which also blocks OAI-SearchBot and asks ChatGPT search to stop indexing you, the opposite of what most businesses actually want. Decide separately for training and for search visibility. Which AI bots should your website allow breaks down the tradeoff bot by bot. AI Visibility shows whether you're actually being recommended in ChatGPT and other AI platforms today.

Lazy loading defers the download of offscreen content — images, iframes, videos — until a user scrolls near them. Instead of loading everything when the page first opens, the browser loads only what's visible. The rest loads on demand.

This directly improves page speed, Core Web Vitals, and mobile performance. For images, the standard approach is the loading="lazy" HTML attribute. For iframes (embedded maps, videos, third-party widgets), the same attribute works in modern browsers. Deferring offscreen images is one of the most common recommendations in Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights audits.

Site Audit checks whether your images and iframes use lazy loading correctly, flags oversized assets, and recommends modern formats like WebP and AVIF. Scout explains which fixes will have the biggest impact on your page speed scores. Surmado Sites ships pages with lazy loading and modern image formats already in place, so there's nothing to retrofit.

Local GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of showing up when your customer asks AI for a recommendation, the same way Local SEO is the practice of showing up when they search Google. Same job. New surface.

The mental model travels from Local SEO. Share of voice, competitor benchmarking, weekly monitoring all carry over. The mechanics change. The biggest shift: proximity becomes persona. Google's local pack ranked by physical closeness. AI ranks by who's asking and what they want. A celiac family and a budget diner asking the same question at the same address get different answers.

Local GEO isn't a separate Surmado product. It's how Scout already works. Every AI Visibility report runs the practice: persona-based testing across seven AI platforms, weekly monitoring, conversational follow-up.

The "Local" matters. Most GEO content is written for enterprise brands. Local GEO is the same discipline applied to local businesses: restaurants, dentists, contractors, salons, agencies serving local clients.

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. NAP consistency means these three pieces of information are exactly the same everywhere your business appears online — Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps, industry directories, social profiles, and your own website.

Inconsistent NAP information confuses both search engines and AI platforms. If Google finds three different phone numbers for your business, it loses confidence in your data. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity rely on the same signals. Inconsistent NAP means lower trust, weaker entity recognition, and fewer recommendations.

Site Audit flags NAP issues in your structured data and on-page content. AI Visibility tests whether AI platforms have the right information about your business. Scout connects the dots and tells you which listings to fix first. On your own website, Surmado Sites keeps the NAP in your schema and page content locked to a single source of truth, so at least one listing is never the problem.

OAI-SearchBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to find and index pages for ChatGPT's search feature. When ChatGPT answers a question with a live web search and cites or links a source, this is the bot that made that page eligible to appear. It's separate from GPTBot, which trains OpenAI's models; OAI-SearchBot is about what ChatGPT can show a user right now.

If you want to be found and cited in ChatGPT, this is the bot that actually matters, not GPTBot. Blocking OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt asks ChatGPT search not to index your site, and your presence there typically drops away over time. How to get found by ChatGPT covers what to check beyond robots.txt. AI Visibility tests whether ChatGPT and other AI platforms actually recommend your business.

Open Graph is a protocol created by Facebook that lets you control the title, description, and image that appear when someone shares your URL. Without Open Graph tags, platforms guess — and they usually guess wrong. A missing og:image means no preview image. A missing og:title means a truncated URL instead of your headline.

The key Open Graph tags are og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url. Each page on your site should have unique values. The og:image should be at least 1200×630 pixels for high-resolution displays. Open Graph tags also affect how your pages appear in Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, and other platforms that render link previews.

Site Audit checks every page for missing or malformed Open Graph tags, validates image dimensions, and flags common issues like relative URLs or missing og:type declarations. Scout explains which pages need attention and why. Surmado Sites sets correct Open Graph tags on every page it builds, so new pages look right the first time they're shared.

PerplexityBot crawls and indexes the web so Perplexity can cite and link sources in its answers. Unlike OpenAI's or Anthropic's training crawlers, PerplexityBot isn't used to train a foundation model; Perplexity builds on other companies' underlying models and runs its own large-scale web index to power search and citations.

Because Perplexity relies on its own index rather than another search engine's, blocking PerplexityBot has a direct effect: your site becomes ineligible to be cited or linked in Perplexity's answers, with no separate "training only" bot to fall back on. Which AI bots should your website allow covers where PerplexityBot fits next to the other major crawlers. AI Visibility tests whether Perplexity and other AI platforms actually recommend your business.

Most AI visibility tools test generic prompts like "best SEO tools" or "top marketing software." Real customers search differently. A busy restaurant owner asks different questions than a marketing agency. A first-time founder searches differently than a serial entrepreneur.

Persona-based testing uses prompts built from actual customer archetypes.

Scout writes a deep customer profile from your business and tests it across seven AI platforms with dozens of questions your customer would actually ask. Membership unlocks more personas through Monitoring: three different personas every week on every platform, 84 conversations per month.

Schema markup is code (usually JSON-LD) that you add to your pages to explicitly describe your content to search engines and AI platforms. Instead of guessing that a page is about a local business, a recipe, or an event, crawlers read the structured data and know for certain. Schema.org defines hundreds of types — LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Product, Service, and more.

For local businesses, LocalBusiness schema with correct NAP information, service areas, and business hours is essential. For service businesses, adding Service and Offer schemas helps search engines understand what you sell. FAQ schema can earn rich results in Google and provide training signals for AI platforms.

Site Audit validates your schema markup, checks for errors, and identifies missing schema opportunities. AI Visibility tests whether AI platforms are picking up your structured data. Scout recommends which schema types matter most for your business. Surmado Sites generates and maintains the right schema for every page automatically, so your structured data stays correct as your site changes.

Scout is the AI research tool built into every Surmado plan. Most marketing tools give you data and expect you to figure out what it means. Scout does the research for you (AI Visibility, Site Audit, and Strategy) and delivers finished work in ~15 minutes.

Scout reads every report and remembers your brand. Ask it to prep for a client call, compare two brands, or explain what changed since last month. No dashboards. Just talk to Scout.

Scout gets smarter with every Job you run. The more context Scout has about your business, the more specific and actionable the recommendations become.

An SEO site scan crawls your website page by page, checking for technical issues that affect how search engines index and rank your content. This includes broken links, missing meta tags, slow page speed, duplicate content, redirect chains, missing alt text, and hundreds of other factors.

Most SEO scan tools give you a spreadsheet of issues sorted by severity. The problem is knowing what to fix first. A site with 200 warnings needs prioritization, not just a longer list. Some issues (like a missing canonical tag on your homepage) matter far more than others (like a missing meta description on a 404 page).

Site Audit runs a comprehensive SEO site scan and delivers prioritized recommendations instead of raw data. Scout reads the full audit and explains what to fix first, why it matters, and how to do it. No SEO expertise required. Sites customers tend to see shorter lists here, since Surmado Sites builds the technical foundation correctly from the start instead of leaving it to be caught later.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS TXT record you publish for your domain that names the mail servers allowed to send email as you. When a message arrives claiming to be from your domain, the receiving server checks the sending server's IP address against your SPF record. If the sender isn't on the list, the message looks forged, and spam filters treat it accordingly.

Most SPF problems come from adding a new email tool, a CRM, a booking system, a newsletter service, without updating the record to include it. A domain can only have one SPF record, so a second tool usually needs to be merged into the existing list, not added as a separate record. The Website Health Check reads your SPF record for free and flags whether it's missing, broken, or duplicated, the kind of mistake that quietly sends real customer emails to spam. If your emails are landing in spam or not arriving at all, why emails don't arrive covers the full list of causes.

A subprocessor is any third-party company that handles personal data on behalf of a service you use. When you sign up for a SaaS tool, that tool likely uses other services for payments, email, hosting, analytics, and authentication. Each of those services is a subprocessor.

Under GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks, companies must disclose their subprocessors so customers know who has access to their data. A subprocessor list typically includes the company name, purpose, and location. Responsible SaaS companies publish this list publicly and notify customers when it changes.

Surmado publishes a complete subprocessor list on our security page. We use Stripe for payments, Clerk for authentication, and Google Cloud for infrastructure. We do not sell your data and we minimize what we collect.

Website as a Service (WaaS) means your site is a subscription, not a project. Instead of paying an agency once for a build you then own and maintain alone, or paying yourself in hours with a DIY builder, you pay monthly for a site that's built, hosted, updated, and maintained as part of the service. When something needs to change, you ask; you don't rebuild.

The model only works if what's yours stays yours when you leave: your domain and your content. Before signing up for any Website as a Service, check both: if the provider owns your domain or locks your content into a proprietary format, you're not renting hosting, you're renting your business's front door.

Surmado Sites is Website as a Service done that way: your domain and content stay yours, the initial rebuild is free, most sites are ready within 24 hours, and a human checks every change. See pricing for plan details.

An XML sitemap is a structured file (usually at /sitemap.xml) that tells search engines which pages exist on your site, when they were last updated, and how important they are relative to each other. Search engines like Google use sitemaps to discover pages that might not be found through normal crawling, especially on large or new sites.

A good XML sitemap includes only indexable, canonical pages. It excludes redirects, noindex pages, and duplicate URLs. It stays under the 50,000 URL / 50 MB limit per file. For sites with multiple languages, a sitemap can include hreflang annotations to help Google serve the right language version.

Site Audit checks whether your sitemap exists, validates its structure, and flags issues like broken URLs, missing pages, or sitemap-index mismatches. Scout explains which sitemap issues are blocking your indexing and what to fix. Surmado Sites regenerates your sitemap automatically every time a page is added or changed, so it never falls out of sync with what's actually live.

Zero-click search happens when someone gets the information they need without visiting your website. Google's featured snippets, AI Overviews, and direct answers all contribute to zero-click search. So do AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

For businesses, this means traditional traffic metrics are becoming less reliable. Someone might learn about you, trust you, and choose you without ever visiting your site.

AI Visibility tests whether you appear in these zero-click environments. Site Audit audits whether your content is structured to be featured. Scout helps you prioritize what to fix.