HowTo Schema
Markup for step-by-step instructions, labelling each step in order. Useful for anything procedural, and easy for an assistant to reproduce accurately.
Related terms
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.
Speech Recognition
Turning spoken words into text. It underpins voice search, dictation and call transcription, and it now handles accents and background noise far better than it used to.
AI Agent
An AI that does things rather than only answering — browsing a site, filling a form, completing a booking. It is why websites are starting to be judged on whether a machine can use them, not only read them.
Training Data
The text, images or code a model learned from. It shapes everything the model knows and every bias it carries, and it is why what your website said two years ago may still be what an assistant repeats.
RDFa
Another attribute-based markup standard for embedding machine-readable facts in a page. Less common on business websites than JSON-LD, and largely equivalent in what it can express.
AI Crawler
A bot that reads websites on behalf of an AI company, either to build an index or to answer a live question. They arrive under their own names and obey robots.txt, so you can decide which are welcome.