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
Guardrails
The limits placed on what an AI may say or do — refusing certain requests, staying on topic, never inventing a price. Essential on anything customer-facing.
Content Provenance
A record of where a piece of content came from and how it was made, sometimes attached to the file itself. Emerging as a way to tell an original photograph from a generated one.
robots.txt
A plain text file at the root of a site listing which bots may read what. It is a request rather than a lock — well-behaved crawlers obey it, and all the major AI crawlers do.
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.
Topical Authority
Being recognised as a reliable source on a subject rather than on a single keyword, usually by covering it thoroughly and consistently. It is what makes a small site beat a bigger one in a narrow field.
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.