Conversational Search
Searching by asking a full question, often as a follow-up to a previous one, the way you would ask a person. It favours pages that answer plainly over pages stuffed with keywords.
Related terms
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside tools and data in a consistent way. It matters to businesses because it is how an assistant might one day query your booking system directly.
AI Search
Searching by asking a question in ordinary language and getting a written reply, rather than typing keywords and choosing from links. It changes what a website has to do: be readable and quotable by a machine, not just findable.
Content Freshness
How recently a page was published or genuinely updated. It matters most for things that change — prices, availability, guidance — and matters little for things that do not.
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.
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.
Training Data
The text, images or code a model learned from. It shapes everything the model knows and every bias it carries, and it is why what your website said two years ago may still be what an assistant repeats.