Trying to keep up with AI search terminology can be overwhelming. With new platforms, tools, and best practices emerging rapidly, even experienced marketers and technical teams find themselves searching for clear answers. Scrunch is built for the next era of search - so it's only fitting that we help demystify the language powering this transformation.

That's why we created the Scrunch AI Glossary. Here you'll find simple definitions for the most important terms in AI-driven search, content optimization, and Scrunch's own platform features. Where a term corresponds to a metric you'd look up in Explorer, we've included the exact Explorer picker label and API field name so you can find it quickly. Bookmark this page whenever you need to quickly clarify an AI or Scrunch-specific buzzword.

Here are all the must-know definitions to make understanding AI optimization and Scrunch terminology a bit more manageable:

AI Optimization

The practice of ensuring website content is readable, understandable, and favored by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. This includes technical accessibility, contextual clarity, and writing style adjustments.

Presence (Explorer label: Mentions Rate; API field: brand_presence_percentage)

A measurement of how often your brand is explicitly mentioned in the written AI-generated answer across platforms.

Presence reflects whether a real user would see your brand named when reading an AI response. Mentions that appear only inside cited URLs, page titles, or source snippets do not count toward Presence unless the AI includes your brand directly in its answer. Citations of your brand's domain are tracked separately as Citations Rate.

Competitive Presence

A comparison of how often your brand and your competitors are explicitly mentioned in AI-generated answers for the same set of prompts.

A higher Competitive Presence indicates that your brand appears more frequently in AI responses than competing brands, reflecting stronger visibility relative to peers in AI-driven search experiences. In Explorer, compare brands using Mentions Rate (brand_presence_percentage and competitor_presence_percentage) with a brand/competitor breakdown, or use Share of Voice (brand_share_of_voice, competitor_share_of_voice) for a normalized comparison where all slices sum to 1.

Position Score (Explorer label: Position Average; API field: brand_position_score)

A score from 0-100 that places your brand into one of three coarse buckets based on where it appears in an AI-generated response, calculated over responses that mention it:

This is a coarse top, middle, or bottom bucket, not a literal percentile measurement of response length. Higher placements are typically more visible to users and indicate stronger AI relevance.

Sentiment Score (Explorer label: Sentiment Average; API field: brand_sentiment_score)

A qualitative measure of how your brand is being described in AI responses:

This helps gauge brand perception in AI-generated answers. See Understanding Sentiment in Scrunch for more detail.

Context Tab

A Scrunch feature where you can define your brand's key information: personas, competitors, and topics. This data powers prompt generation and segmentation. See Understanding the AI Context Tab in Scrunch.

Customer Persona

A fictionalized profile of a target customer. Used in Scrunch to tailor prompt generation based on different user intents. Learn more in How Personas Are Used Within Scrunch.

Key Topics

Themes or concepts you want to monitor across prompts. Used for filtering and analyzing presence across content areas.

Sub-brands

Additional brand entities or product lines associated with your primary brand that can be tracked separately in Scrunch. Sub-brands allow you to monitor presence and citations for distinct offerings or regional brands under your organization's umbrella. See Understanding Sub-brands in Scrunch.

Prompts

The natural language questions or statements you're tracking in Scrunch to see how AI models respond. Each prompt can run across multiple AI platforms (for example ChatGPT and Perplexity), generating a separate response per platform, but the prompt itself still counts once toward your unique prompt total. Prompts form the backbone of your monitoring configuration. See How to Add Prompts in Scrunch.

Prompts (Explorer label: Unique Prompts; API field: unique_prompts)

A metric showing the number of distinct prompts tracked in Scrunch that have at least one response. A prompt tracked across multiple AI platforms still counts once toward this total, it is not counted once per platform. This metric now lives in Explorer; the legacy Prompts table has been retired.

Topic Prompt Optimizations

A Scrunch feature that provides AI-generated recommendations for improving your prompts to better align with specific topics and customer personas. These optimizations help refine your monitoring strategy to capture more relevant AI responses. See Topic Prompt Optimizations.

Responses (Explorer label: Total Responses; API field: entity-agnostic)

The total number of AI-generated responses captured by Scrunch for your prompts. Scrunch regularly re-runs your tracked prompts across supported models and stores the full outputs. This count shows how much real-world data you've already accumulated for analysis.

Knowledge Studio

Scrunch's feature for creating and managing structured knowledge content that AI platforms can easily access and cite. Knowledge Studio helps you organize brand information, product details, and key facts in formats optimized for AI consumption. See Knowledge Studio.

Scrunch MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Scrunch's integration that allows users to query Scrunch data directly from AI assistants like Claude and Cursor. The MCP enables you to access your presence metrics, citation data, and prompt insights without leaving your AI workflow. See How to Connect the Scrunch MCP to Your AI Assistant.

Scrunchie

Scrunch's integration that allows you to query Scrunch data directly inside your Scrunch instance. Scrunchie enables you to access and ask questions about your data as well as ask for support. Scrunchie will route to human support if necessary.

Training Data Crawlers

Bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or CCBot that collect data for AI model training. You can block these in robots.txt without hurting AI citation performance. See Understanding AI Bot Types (Retrieval, Indexer, Training, Uncategorized).

Bot Blocking

A configuration that restricts automated bots (like those used by AI or search engines) from accessing your website content. Over-aggressive bot blocking can prevent AI platforms from citing your pages.

AI User Agent

A bot identifier used by AI platforms when retrieving web content. Examples include ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, and meta-externalagent. Allowlisting these in robots.txt and bot protection tools ensures visibility in AI responses. See the Guide to AI User Agents.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity AI's bot that handles both search indexing and real-time content retrieval. Should be allowlisted for presence in Perplexity responses.

ChatGPT-User

OpenAI's bot used to retrieve web content in real-time for ChatGPT answers. Must be allowlisted for your site to be cited in ChatGPT responses.

Explorer Tab

A Scrunch feature for discovering and analyzing AI-generated responses across your tracked prompts. Explorer has replaced the legacy Citations and Prompts tables as the primary place to build custom views of your metrics, with support for up to 5 metrics, 3 breakdowns, and 8 filters in a single view.

Rate and average charts in Explorer show the underlying sample size in the tooltip (for example, "43% (37 of 86 responses)"), so you can see how much data is behind a percentage before you act on it.

Optimizer

A Scrunch tool that provides actionable recommendations for improving your content's performance in AI responses. The Optimizer analyzes your current presence and citation patterns to suggest strategic improvements. See Understanding the Optimizer in Scrunch.

AI Referrals Tab

A dashboard to view human visits to your website referred from AI platforms. This is visible for orgs who have existing GA4 or Adobe Analytics environments set up through the Integrations tab. See Connecting the AI Referrals Tool to your Google Analytics Account.

Agent Traffic

Website traffic originating from AI agents and platforms. This includes visits from users clicking citations in AI-generated responses, as well as direct bot traffic from AI crawlers accessing your content.

Content Delivery (AXP) Tab

The Agent Experience Platform (AXP) tab in Scrunch, which provides tools and insights for optimizing how your content is delivered to and consumed by AI agents. This includes monitoring agent interactions, tracking content accessibility, and analyzing delivery performance. See Understanding the Content Delivery (AXP) tab.

Deep AI Audit

A Scrunch tool that analyzes how your site appears to AI bots. Checks for accessibility, context quality, performance, and formatting. See Understanding the Site Audit Tool in Scrunch.

Access Controls Score

A category within the Scrunch Site Audit that evaluates whether AI bots (like ChatGPT-User or PerplexityBot) can access your site. This includes checks on robots.txt, firewall settings, and bot protections (e.g., Cloudflare). A low score often indicates technical barriers that could block AI from citing your content.

Content Clarity

A metric in Scrunch's Site Audit that assesses how clearly AI models can interpret your page after stripping out styling and JavaScript. Pages with overly complex structures, fragmented markup, or text buried in visual elements tend to perform poorly.

Does your robots.txt have specific rules allowing all key AI bots?

A proactive Site Audit flag that checks whether your robots.txt file explicitly allows AI user agents like ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, and meta-externalagent. While not required for access, allowing these bots is recommended to reduce friction and avoid blocking AI visibility unintentionally.

Dynamic Content

Website content loaded via JavaScript. Most AI crawlers cannot process this, which means dynamically rendered content may not be cited unless pre-rendered or supported with fallback text.

Structured Data (Schema)

Metadata like JSON-LD that can enrich SEO results. For AI, however, the actual on-page text content is far more influential. Schema should complement, not replace, clear text.

Citation Details Page

A dedicated view in Scrunch that displays comprehensive information about individual citations, including the full AI response, cited URLs, position analysis, and historical citation patterns. This page provides deep insights into how and why your content is being referenced by AI platforms.

Citation Frequency (legacy Citations tab metric)

The legacy Citations dashboard is being retired in favor of Explorer. This metric was the number of responses that cite the domain or URL divided by total responses (within selected filters/time). In Explorer, the same idea is now called Citations Rate (API field: brand_citation_rate). See Understanding Citation Metrics in Scrunch for the full set of citation metrics.

Note: Grok no longer contributes citation data. Grok's presence, position, and sentiment metrics are unaffected.

Citation Consistency (legacy Citations dashboard metric)

The percentage of responses that have cited the source: the number of responses citing that source divided by the total number of responses that cited any source. In Explorer, this is now called Citations Share of Voice (API field: brand_citation_share_of_voice), which uses the same denominator, of the responses that cite anything, the share that cite a source owned by the brand.

Custom Citation Segments

User-defined groupings of URLs or domains that allow you to track citation performance for specific content categories, product lines, or strategic initiatives. Custom segments enable more granular analysis beyond default brand and competitor tracking. See Custom Citation Segments.

Branded Domain (current config)

Only primary domain is treated as brand; other brand-related domains are separate unless added to brand config in the context tab.

Brand ID (API)

Identifier in the URL path (e.g., "b/2351") used to target specific regional/brand environments via the API.