Multimodal
An AI that handles more than one kind of input — text and images together, say, or audio and video. It is why you can now photograph a menu and ask an assistant what is in a dish.
Related terms
Organization Schema
Structured data describing the business itself: name, logo, address, contact details, social profiles. The single most useful markup for being recognised, and the one most small sites are missing.
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.
Search Intent
What somebody actually wants when they type a query: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a specific site. Matching it matters more than matching the words.
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.
Watermarking
Marking AI-generated content so it can be identified later, often invisibly. Part of the same effort as provenance, and equally early.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Answer Engine Optimization is the work of becoming the source that answers a question rather than one of ten links offered. It matters because search increasingly replies with a written answer, and only one or two businesses get named inside it.