Content Provenance
A record of where a piece of content came from and how it was made, sometimes attached to the file itself. Emerging as a way to tell an original photograph from a generated one.
Related terms
Unsupervised Learning
Training a model on unlabelled data and letting it find structure by itself — grouping similar customers, say, without being told what the groups are.
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?”
Content Negotiation
When the same URL serves different formats depending on what the visitor asks for — HTML for a browser, Markdown for an assistant. It lets one address serve people and machines without either getting a compromise.
Conversational Search
Searching by asking a full question, often as a follow-up to a previous one, the way you would ask a person. It favours pages that answer plainly over pages stuffed with keywords.
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing instructions that get reliable results from an AI — being specific, giving examples, saying what to avoid. Less mysterious than it sounds, and mostly the same skill as briefing a new colleague well.
Human-in-the-Loop
Keeping a person in the decision, either approving what the AI produced or handling the cases it flags. The usual sensible middle ground between doing everything by hand and trusting a machine completely.