AI Referral Traffic
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Usually small in number and unusually well-qualified, because they clicked after reading a recommendation.
Related terms
sameAs
A structured-data property that links your business to its profiles elsewhere — Facebook, LinkedIn, a directory. It is how a model confirms you exist in more than one place, which makes it far likelier to name you.
AI Visibility
How often, and how accurately, AI assistants mention your business when someone asks about what you do. Unlike search rankings there is no official scoreboard, so it is measured by asking the assistants and by watching which crawlers visit.
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.
Crawl Budget
The rough limit on how much of your site a crawler will fetch in a visit. Slow pages and endless near-duplicate URLs spend it on nothing, so the pages that matter get visited less often.
Answer Engine
An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are all answer engines. The old question was “do we rank?”; the new one is “are we the answer?”
Markdown
A plain-text way of writing formatted documents using symbols like # for a heading. AI systems read it easily because the structure is unambiguous, which is why some sites now offer it alongside HTML.