Crawl Budget
The rough limit on how much of your site a crawler will fetch in a visit. Slow pages and endless near-duplicate URLs spend it on nothing, so the pages that matter get visited less often.
Related terms
Token
The unit an AI reads and writes in — roughly three quarters of a word. Models are priced and limited by tokens, which is why very long documents cost more and sometimes get truncated.
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.
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.
AI Share of Voice
How often your business is named when assistants are asked about your category, compared with competitors. There is no official figure, so it is measured by asking the same questions repeatedly and counting.
Predictive Analytics
Using historical data to estimate what will happen next: which customers will lapse, which stock will run out. Useful precisely to the degree that the past resembles the future.
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?”