Prompt
The instruction or question you give an AI. The wording matters more than people expect: the same request phrased two ways can produce noticeably different answers.
Related terms
FAQPage Schema
Markup that labels questions and their answers as questions and answers. It is the most direct way to hand an assistant something it can quote in full without swallowing the surrounding page.
Tool Use
An AI reaching outside itself to do something it cannot do alone: run a search, do arithmetic reliably, read a live page. Nearly every useful assistant depends on it.
User-Agent
The name a browser or bot gives when it requests a page. It is how a server tells Googlebot from ChatGPT from a person, and how robots.txt rules are addressed to one and not another.
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.
Vector Database
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly. It is the part of an AI search system that decides which of your pages is relevant to a question.
Inference
The moment an AI actually answers, as opposed to when it was trained. Training happens once and costs a fortune; inference happens every time somebody asks, and is what you pay for per use.