Neural Network
A system of simple connected units, loosely inspired by the brain, that learns patterns from examples rather than following rules somebody wrote. Nearly all modern AI is built on one.
Related terms
LocalBusiness Schema
Organization markup with the details a local search needs — address, opening hours, service area, price range. What lets an assistant answer “is there one near me, and are they open now?”
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.
Vector Search
Searching by meaning rather than by matching words. A page that never uses the phrase somebody typed can still be the best answer, and vector search is what finds it.
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.
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?”
Passage Ranking
When a search engine surfaces one relevant passage from a long page rather than judging the page as a whole. Clear headings are what make a passage findable in isolation.