metrics
Semantic similarity
How close two pieces of text are in embedding space — the cosine distance between their vectors.
Definition
Semantic similarity is the cosine of the angle between two embedding vectors, ranging from -1 (opposite) to 1 (identical). In retrieval, the engine computes query↔document semantic similarity and prefers documents with higher scores. Unlike keyword match, semantic similarity catches paraphrase, synonyms, and concept overlap.
Example
Query 'how to grow a SaaS startup' has high semantic similarity (~0.85) to a page titled 'scaling B2B software companies' even with zero keyword overlap.How to optimize
Write for the meaning, not just the keywords. VectorCite's content rubric scores semantic alignment between your page and decomposed sub-queries.