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.
Related terms
Content Negotiation
When the same URL serves different formats depending on what the visitor asks for — HTML for a browser, Markdown for an assistant. It lets one address serve people and machines without either getting a compromise.
Zero-Click Search
A search where the person gets their answer on the results page and never visits a website. Common for opening hours, definitions and conversions — and increasingly common for everything else as AI answers grow.
AI Crawler
A bot that reads websites on behalf of an AI company, either to build an index or to answer a live question. They arrive under their own names and obey robots.txt, so you can decide which are welcome.
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.
AI Agent
An AI that does things rather than only answering — browsing a site, filling a form, completing a booking. It is why websites are starting to be judged on whether a machine can use them, not only read them.
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.