robots.txt
A plain text file at the root of a site listing which bots may read what. It is a request rather than a lock — well-behaved crawlers obey it, and all the major AI crawlers do.
Related terms
AI Content Detection
Tools that claim to identify AI-written text. Unreliable in both directions, and worth knowing about mainly because somebody may point one at your content and draw a confident wrong conclusion.
AI Citation
When an assistant names your website as the source of something it said, usually with a link. A citation is the AI-era equivalent of a first-page ranking — it is the thing worth competing for.
Synthetic Content
Text, images or video produced by AI. Not penalised for being synthetic, but it is judged by the same standard as anything else — and thin AI-written pages fail that standard easily.
Function Calling
When a model, instead of answering from memory, asks to run a specific tool — look up a price, check stock — and uses the result. It is what turns a chat assistant into something that can act.
Knowledge Graph
A map of things and how they relate — this company, its founder, its address, its services. Search engines and AI systems use one to know that two mentions of a name refer to the same business.
Watermarking
Marking AI-generated content so it can be identified later, often invisibly. Part of the same effort as provenance, and equally early.