Glossary
The words, defined from what we measure.
Every entry carries something we can say and a general definition cannot — a number out of our own audits, a distinction we drew, or a rule we operate by. Terms we have nothing first-hand to add about are not here.
Rewrite rate
Rewrite rate is the share of an AI-produced draft you change before it goes to a client — the one number that tells you whether a system is doing your work or drafting near it.
Fully-loaded cost
Fully-loaded cost is what an employee actually costs once payroll tax, insurance, recruiting, equipment and the ramp time of whoever trains them are counted — not their salary.
Escalation ladder
An escalation ladder is a fixed sequence of chases for an overdue invoice where each rung increases specificity — a more precise person, a more precise fact — rather than increasing pressure.
Completion contract
A completion contract is an output schema treated as the definition of done — the run ends when a valid result is written — rather than as validation applied after the fact.
Agent harness
An agent harness is everything around the model that makes unattended work safe: the schedules that start it, the credentials it never sees, the guards that stop it acting twice, and the state that survives a crash mid-job.
AI visibility
AI visibility is whether an AI assistant names your firm when somebody asks it to recommend one, measured by asking the question and reading the answer rather than by inspecting your site.
Surface
A surface is one assistant you can be asked about — ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity — each answering the same question from its own index and its own model.
Share of voice
Share of voice is the proportion of AI answers about your category that mention you at all, across a fixed set of buyer questions — not your position within an answer.
Generative engine optimisation
Generative engine optimisation is the work of becoming the source an AI assistant quotes when it answers a question in your category, as distinct from ranking a page in a list of links.
Selection and absorption
Absorption is a model knowing your brand from training data; selection is a retrieval system picking your page as a source for one specific answer. They are different phenomena with different causes and different fixes.