Chunking
Splitting a long page into smaller passages so an AI can retrieve just the relevant part. Pages with clear headings chunk cleanly; a single unbroken wall of text does not.
Related terms
Fine-Tuning
Taking a general model and training it further on your own examples so it follows your tone or handles your particular task. Useful when prompting alone keeps producing nearly-right answers.
Reinforcement Learning
Training by trial, error and reward rather than by examples. It is how models are tuned to be helpful and to refuse things they should refuse.
User-Agent
The name a browser or bot gives when it requests a page. It is how a server tells Googlebot from ChatGPT from a person, and how robots.txt rules are addressed to one and not another.
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.
AI Content Detection
Tools that claim to identify AI-written text. Unreliable in both directions, and worth knowing about mainly because somebody may point one at your content and draw a confident wrong conclusion.
Answer Engine
An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are all answer engines. The old question was “do we rank?”; the new one is “are we the answer?”