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.
Related terms
AI Overviews
The written summary Google now places above its search results, assembled from several pages and citing a few of them. Appearing inside one can bring visitors; being left out of one can quietly cost you the clicks you used to get.
E-E-A-T
Google’s shorthand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the qualities its raters look for. Not a score you can see, but a decent description of what makes content worth surfacing.
GPTBot
OpenAI’s crawler for building its index. Blocking it in robots.txt keeps your content out of that index — and out of the answers built from it.
PerplexityBot
Perplexity’s crawler. Perplexity cites its sources prominently, so being readable by it is one of the more direct routes to a visible citation.
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.
Function Calling
When a model, instead of answering from memory, asks to run a specific tool — look up a price, check stock — and uses the result. It is what turns a chat assistant into something that can act.