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.
Related terms
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.
Hallucination
When an AI states something false with complete confidence — an invented price, a policy you never had, a product you do not sell. The usual cause is that the correct fact was not available anywhere it could read.
Entity
A distinct thing a search engine can recognise: a company, a person, a place, a product. Being understood as an entity, rather than as a string of characters, is what lets you be recommended by name.
Google-Extended
The robots.txt setting that controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini and AI Overviews. It is separate from ordinary Google Search, so you can allow one and refuse the other.
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing instructions that get reliable results from an AI — being specific, giving examples, saying what to avoid. Less mysterious than it sounds, and mostly the same skill as briefing a new colleague well.
Predictive Analytics
Using historical data to estimate what will happen next: which customers will lapse, which stock will run out. Useful precisely to the degree that the past resembles the future.