Terms, explained

An approach to building AI systems that act with some autonomy: they plan steps, use tools and adjust to results, instead of only answering a single prompt.

A software system that uses an AI model to pursue a goal: it decides what to do next, calls tools, reads the results and repeats until the task is done or it gets stuck.

Everything an AI agent can see when it makes a decision: instructions, conversation, tool results, retrieved documents and any task state placed in the prompt.

Tying an AI agent's answers and actions to trusted sources, such as your documents, databases or live tool results, so it does not rely on guesses.

The information an AI agent can keep and recall beyond a single prompt, such as earlier conversation turns, saved facts, past results or user preferences.

A conversational AI tool that helps a person with tasks such as answering questions, drafting text or finding information, usually by responding to their requests turn by turn.

Using AI models inside automated processes so that tasks like sorting, summarizing, drafting or routing happen without a person doing each step by hand.

When an AI assistant or AI search tool names or links to your page as a source for something in its answer.

An automated bot run by an AI company that fetches web pages, either to train models, to build an AI search index or to load a page when a user asks about it.

Search that uses AI models to understand a question and write a direct answer, often with sources, instead of only listing links to pages.

How often and how prominently your brand, site or content shows up in answers from AI assistants and AI search tools.

Content written and formatted so that both people and AI systems can quickly understand what it says: clear headings, direct answers, plain language and specific facts.

A website that AI crawlers and agents can reach, read and understand reliably: crawlable, fast, well structured and clear about what each page covers.

Making your content easy for answer engines, such as AI assistants and AI search, to find, understand and use when they give a direct answer to a question.

A defined way for one piece of software to ask another to do something or share data, usually over the web using requests and responses.

Structured data that describes an article or blog post, including its headline, author, publish date and last-modified date, using the Article type from Schema.org.

The preferred address of a page that you tell search engines to treat as the main version when the same or very similar content is reachable at several URLs.

The maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can take in and consider at once, including your instructions, the conversation and its own reply.

The process where a search engine or other bot follows links and fetches web pages so it can discover and read them.

A Schema.org property that states when a page's content was last meaningfully changed, used in structured data such as Article markup.

Splitting long documents into smaller pieces before indexing them, so a retrieval system can return just the relevant part instead of a whole document.

Lists of numbers that represent the meaning of a piece of text (or an image), so that similar meanings end up close together and can be compared by a computer.

Planning for and reacting to things going wrong in software or a workflow, so a failure is caught, recorded and dealt with instead of silently breaking or corrupting data.

Structured data that marks up a page of questions and their single published answers, using the FAQPage type from Schema.org.

The original name for tool calling: the model outputs a structured request to run a named function with specific arguments, and your code executes it.

AI that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, video or code, instead of only classifying or predicting from existing data.

Shaping your content and site so that generative AI search tools are more likely to use it and mention it in the answers they write.

The main heading of a page, marked up as the top-level heading in HTML, that tells readers and search engines what the page is about.

A property of an operation where running it once or many times gives the same end result, so repeating it after a failure or duplicate does no extra harm.

A short text description added to an image in HTML that screen readers announce and search engines use to understand what the image shows.

When a search engine stores and organizes a page it has crawled so that it can be shown in search results.

Links from one page of your site to another page on the same site, which help visitors navigate and help search engines find pages and understand how they relate.

A format for writing structured data as a block of JSON in a page's HTML, and the method most search engines recommend for adding Schema.org markup.

An organized collection of information, such as documents, FAQs or articles, that people or AI systems can search to find answers.

A neural network trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language. It is the engine behind most chatbots, AI assistants and AI agents.

When a language model produces information that sounds confident and plausible but is false, invented or not supported by any source it was given.

A proposed plain-text Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives language models a short guide to a site and links to its most useful pages.

A short summary of a page in its HTML that search engines may show under the title in results, written to help people decide whether to click.

A workflow automation tool where you connect apps and services by building visual workflows, with options to self-host and to add custom code and AI steps.

Structured data that describes a company or publisher: its name, logo, website and official profiles, using the Organization type from Schema.org.

The practice of writing and structuring the instructions, examples and context given to an AI model so it produces reliable, useful output.

A bug where the result depends on the timing of two or more processes that run at the same time, so the same code sometimes works and sometimes fails.

A technique that finds relevant passages in your own data and adds them to the prompt, so a language model answers from those sources instead of from memory alone.

Rules for automatically trying a failed operation again, such as how many times, how long to wait between attempts and when to give up.

A plain-text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which parts of it they may or may not request. It is a request, not a security control.

A shared vocabulary of types and properties, such as Article, Organization and Person, used to describe web content in structured data that search engines understand.

The practice of improving a website so that search engines can find, understand and rank its pages, and so more of the right people reach them.

The underlying goal behind a search query: what the person actually wants to learn, find, compare or do when they type it.

The position a page appears in for a given search query on a search engine results page, which affects how many people see and click it.

Search that matches by meaning instead of exact keywords, so a query can find relevant content even when it uses different words.

Code added to a page that labels its content in a standard format, such as who wrote it, what it is and when it was updated, so machines can read it reliably.

A set of instructions given to an AI model before the conversation starts that defines its role, rules, tone and limits for every response that follows.

The part of SEO that makes sure search engines can crawl, render and index a site properly: speed, structure, links, sitemaps, redirects and correct signals.

The HTML title of a page, shown as the clickable headline in search results and in browser tabs, and a key signal of what the page is about.

A way for an AI model to request that your software run an action, such as a search, database query or API call, and then use the result in its next response.

A database built to store embeddings and quickly find the ones most similar to a query, which powers semantic search and retrieval for AI applications.

An automatic HTTP message that one system sends to a URL you provide when something happens, so your software can react in real time instead of polling.

A defined sequence of steps, with triggers and conditions, that moves a task or piece of data from start to finish.

Using software to run a series of steps automatically when something happens, such as moving data between apps, sending messages or updating records, without manual work.

A file that lists the URLs you want search engines to know about, often with last-modified dates, to help them discover and recrawl your pages.