AI search & attribution glossary for senior living
23 terms, each defined in one sentence you can quote, then explained for the senior-living operator. Updated 2026-10-16.
- “AI rank” (why it does not exist)
- An “AI rank” would be a stable position of a business within an AI assistant's answers; no such position exists, because generative engines return a different set and order of names nearly every time the same question is asked.
- “How did you hear about us?” (HDYHAU)
- “How did you hear about us?” is the self-reported source question on inquiry forms and intake calls; in senior living it is the least reliable attribution signal because the adult-child buyer, the long cycle, and the offline conversion all distort the answer.
- AI visibility
- AI visibility is how often an AI assistant names a specific business when asked a relevant question, measured as a rate across many runs rather than as a position in a single answer.
- AI-sourced inquiry
- An AI-sourced inquiry is a lead whose path to the community began with an AI assistant's answer, identified at capture by signals such as the referring domain, a UTM source naming the engine, a landing page built for AI traffic, or a tracking phone number shown only there.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that search and AI systems can lift a direct answer from it — featured snippets, voice answers, and the answer boxes that precede the blue links.
- Care types
- Care types are the categories of senior-living service a community offers, chiefly independent living, assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, and respite, each with its own family questions, pricing, and expected length of stay.
- Citation source
- A citation source is a web page an AI engine retrieved and relied on while composing an answer, usually shown as a link beside the answer.
- Direct move-in
- A direct move-in is a resident whose family contacted the community without passing through a referral aggregator, so no referral fee is owed on the lease.
- Directional attribution
- Directional attribution is attribution that reports which way the evidence points and how strongly, rather than claiming an exact count, by attaching a confidence level to every link between an inquiry and an outcome.
- Dynamic number insertion (DNI)
- Dynamic number insertion is a call-tracking technique that shows a different phone number to visitors depending on where they came from, so inbound calls can be attributed to a channel.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a business more likely to be named and cited in the answers produced by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results pages, with cited sources, before the traditional list of links.
- Google Business Profile (GBP)
- Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Search and Maps, including name, category, address, hours, photos, reviews, and attributes.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that summarizes what the site and business are and lists its most important pages, written for AI crawlers and assistants to read first.
- Match confidence
- Match confidence is a score between 0 and 1 recording how sure a system is that a captured inquiry and a CRM prospect are the same person, based on the signals used to match them.
- Move-in attribution
- Move-in attribution is the process of linking a signed resident back to the marketing source or sources that produced the family's first contact, so each channel can be credited with the move-ins it drove.
- Referral aggregator
- A referral aggregator is a company that captures families searching for senior living, matches them to communities, and charges the community a fee when a referred family moves in.
- Referral fee
- A referral fee is the amount a senior-living community pays a referral aggregator or placement agent when a family that agency referred signs a lease and moves in, typically 50–120% of the first month's rent.
- Resident lifetime value (LTV)
- Resident lifetime value is the total revenue a community expects from one resident over their stay, estimated as monthly rent multiplied by the expected length of stay for that care type.
- Share of citation
- Share of citation is the proportion of all brand mentions in a set of AI answers that belong to one brand, measured against a named set of competitors.
- Structured data (schema.org)
- Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD following the schema.org vocabulary, that states a page's facts explicitly (organization, address, services, FAQ, ratings) so search and AI systems do not have to infer them.
- UTM parameters
- UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that identify where a visitor came from, so analytics and CRMs can credit the source.
- Wilson confidence interval
- A Wilson confidence interval is the range within which the true rate behind an observed proportion is likely to lie, given the number of trials; it stays sensible at small samples and near 0% or 100%, where simpler formulas break.