Eight terms, defined properly

Social listening is the practice of continuously watching public conversations — on forums, social platforms, news and video — for mentions of a brand, its competitors or the problems it solves, and then deciding which of those mentions are worth acting on.

Buyer intent is a judgement about how close the author of a message is to making a purchase — whether they are describing a problem, asking for a recommendation, comparing named products, or leaving a supplier — expressed as a label or a score.

Share of voice is the proportion of conversation in a defined category that mentions your brand rather than a competitor — usually expressed as a percentage of total mentions across a chosen set of brands, over a chosen period, on a chosen set of sources.

Brand monitoring is the practice of tracking where a brand is named across public sources — social platforms, forums, news, blogs, video and review sites — so that mentions can be answered, escalated or measured rather than discovered by accident.

Sentiment analysis is the automatic classification of a piece of text by the attitude it expresses — usually as positive, negative or neutral, sometimes on a numeric scale or across finer emotional categories.

The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open standard that lets AI assistants connect to external systems — reading their data and calling their functions — through one interface, rather than through a bespoke integration per assistant.

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of trying to influence how AI assistants and AI-powered search describe a brand — by shaping the sources those systems read, rather than by ranking in a conventional list of blue links.

A webhook is an HTTP request that one system sends to a URL you control when a specific event happens — pushing data to you as it occurs, rather than making you repeatedly ask whether anything has changed.