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.
Related terms
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.
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.
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.
Fine-Tuning
Taking a general model and training it further on your own examples so it follows your tone or handles your particular task. Useful when prompting alone keeps producing nearly-right answers.
Computer Vision
AI that interprets images and video — reading a document, recognising a product, counting people. The part of AI that has been quietly working in industry for years.
Microdata
An older way of marking up facts, written as attributes on the HTML itself rather than in a separate block. Still understood, but JSON-LD is now the safer choice.