Glossary · Answer engines and retrieval

Query fan-out

An engine rewriting one user prompt into several internal queries before searching. Optimising for the prompt a person typed ignores the queries the system actually ran, and neither we nor any vendor can observe those directly.

Answer engines and retrieval

How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.

AEO · GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · grounding · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · refusal · AI Overview · answer engine · citation · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · information gain · dense retrieval

← Passage ranking  ·  Chunk boundary →

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