Reference · glossary

Glossary

Every ARIA term in one place — what it means and where it sits in the stack. The exact numbers behind each term live on its own page, so this list stays short and never goes stale.

Getting set up

Verification

Proving a domain is yours with one DNS record at _aria.<domain>: a TXT aria-verify token, or a CNAME to ARIA's verify host.

Crawl

ARIA's background fetch of your verified site — one stored copy per page, re-read on a schedule so every score stays current.

Citation crawler

A retrieval bot that fetches pages to answer a user's question and can cite you — unlike training-only bots, which don't affect citations.

Page cap

The flat safety cap on how many pages one crawl stores (the same for every plan); pages past it are blind spots in every score, since ARIA can't measure what it never stored.

Embed

A one-line script tag that drops ARIA's chat orb on your own site and iframes the conversational page in.

The AI-presence stack

AI-presence stack

The ordered gates from reachable to earning — Access, Readiness, Representation, Citation, Outcome — each passing before the next matters. Not a funnel.

Access

Stage 01: can answer engines fetch and read your pages? A pass/read check on blocked citation crawlers and JS-only pages, not a 0-100 score.

Readiness (AEO)

Stage 02: how ready your pages are to be cited, scored 0-100 from on-page answer-engine-optimization signals. Internally, geo_score.

Representation

Stage 03: whether AI describes your business accurately — claims checked against your own pages (quote-or-stay-silent) — and how it frames you (sentiment). A monitor and fix list, not a 0-100 score.

Citation

Stage 04: how often answer engines actually cite you when asked your tracked questions. Internally, visibility_score.

Outcome

Stage 05 (planned): whether AI citations send you customers. Shown so the picture is honest, not yet measured.

Presence score

Your headline AI-presence number: the plain mean of the two live scores, Readiness and Citation. Derived, never stored.

Share of voice

Across the latest probe, each cited site's share of all citation slots, ranked — who you're cited against, with you among them.

Signals & scoring

GapRadar

What visitors actually ask your on-site chat and voice, and an honest map of what your content fails to answer.

Question discovery

How ARIA auto-builds your tracked-question set from your pages, real chat themes, and rival sites — deduped against what you pinned or muted.

Tracked prompt

A question ARIA asks the answer engines on a schedule; auto-discovered, or pinned and muted by you.

Health band

The colour tier for any 0-100 score: go (good), wait (watch), alarm (act). The cutoffs live on the Scores page.

Score snapshot

One timestamped reading of your scores, appended at the end of each pass; two readings are what movement is measured from.

Gap theme

A cluster of visitor chat questions on one topic, with how many your content answered — its coverage, banded like any score.

Under the hood

The automatic engine

The background loops — crawl, probe, gaps, discover — that re-run each verified domain on its own schedule so scores stay current.

Probe

The pass that asks each configured answer engine your tracked questions, web search on, and records whether you were cited.

Visibility run

One append-only record of one question asked of one engine: whether you were cited, who was cited instead and on which page, an excerpt of the answer, and when.

Trial

A free window that starts when you save a card; you keep full service through it and are charged when it ends.

Plans & billing

Per-domain plans billed monthly through Stripe; lapsing out of good standing pauses crawling, chat, and probing.