AI Citation
When an assistant names your website as the source of something it said, usually with a link. A citation is the AI-era equivalent of a first-page ranking — it is the thing worth competing for.
Related terms
LLM (Large Language Model)
The kind of AI behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. It is trained on an enormous amount of text and predicts what should come next, which is enough to answer questions, summarise, translate and write.
Training Data
The text, images or code a model learned from. It shapes everything the model knows and every bias it carries, and it is why what your website said two years ago may still be what an assistant repeats.
Embedding
A way of turning text into numbers so a computer can tell that “web hosting” and “website server space” are about the same thing. It is what makes search by meaning possible rather than search by exact word.
Applebot-Extended
Apple’s equivalent, governing whether your content feeds Apple Intelligence. Ordinary Applebot, which powers Siri and Spotlight, is controlled separately.
robots.txt
A plain text file at the root of a site listing which bots may read what. It is a request rather than a lock — well-behaved crawlers obey it, and all the major AI crawlers do.
Google-Extended
The robots.txt setting that controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini and AI Overviews. It is separate from ordinary Google Search, so you can allow one and refuse the other.