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.
Related terms
Answer Box
A boxed answer at the top of a results page, lifted from one page and credited to it. Winning one usually means having answered the question plainly and early rather than burying it.
Markdown
A plain-text way of writing formatted documents using symbols like # for a heading. AI systems read it easily because the structure is unambiguous, which is why some sites now offer it alongside HTML.
AI Search
Searching by asking a question in ordinary language and getting a written reply, rather than typing keywords and choosing from links. It changes what a website has to do: be readable and quotable by a machine, not just findable.
OAI-SearchBot
The crawler OpenAI uses to answer live searches in ChatGPT, separate from GPTBot. Blocking one does not block the other, so a site can be absent from ChatGPT search while still being read for training.
Agentic Browsing
An AI navigating a website on somebody’s behalf: finding the price, checking availability, sometimes buying. Sites that rely on hover menus and unlabelled buttons are hard for an agent to use.
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.