AI Referral Traffic
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Usually small in number and unusually well-qualified, because they clicked after reading a recommendation.
Related terms
JSON-LD
The format Google and the AI assistants prefer for structured data — a block of machine-readable facts tucked into the page. It states plainly what prose only implies: this is the business, this is the address, this is the price.
Organization Schema
Structured data describing the business itself: name, logo, address, contact details, social profiles. The single most useful markup for being recognised, and the one most small sites are missing.
Context Window
How much text a model can hold in mind at once, counted in tokens. Anything beyond it is forgotten, which is why very long conversations start to lose earlier details.
Grounding
Giving an AI real source material to answer from, instead of letting it rely on memory. A grounded answer can be checked and cited; an ungrounded one is where hallucinations come from.
Applebot-Extended
Apple’s equivalent, governing whether your content feeds Apple Intelligence. Ordinary Applebot, which powers Siri and Spotlight, is controlled separately.
Content Signals
An extension to robots.txt that states not just who may crawl, but what they may do with what they find: appear in search, be quoted in answers, be used as training data. It lets you permit citation while refusing training.