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.
Related terms
Grounding
Giving an AI real source material to answer from, instead of letting it rely on memory. A grounded answer can be checked and cited; an ungrounded one is where hallucinations come from.
Organization Schema
Structured data describing the business itself: name, logo, address, contact details, social profiles. The single most useful markup for being recognised, and the one most small sites are missing.
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.
Content Signals
An extension to robots.txt that states not just who may crawl, but what they may do with what they find: appear in search, be quoted in answers, be used as training data. It lets you permit citation while refusing training.
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.
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?”