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.
Related terms
PerplexityBot
Perplexity’s crawler. Perplexity cites its sources prominently, so being readable by it is one of the more direct routes to a visible citation.
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.
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.
llms.txt
An emerging convention: a plain-text file at your site root that gives AI systems a clean map of what is on it. It saves an assistant from crawling around to work out what your site contains.
Temperature
A setting that controls how predictable an AI’s output is. Low temperature gives safe, repeatable answers; high temperature gives varied, more surprising ones — useful for ideas, risky for facts.
Hallucination
When an AI states something false with complete confidence — an invented price, a policy you never had, a product you do not sell. The usual cause is that the correct fact was not available anywhere it could read.