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.
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.
NLP (Natural Language Processing)
The field concerned with computers handling human language: understanding it, generating it, translating it. Everything from spam filters to chat assistants sits somewhere in it.
Embedding
A way of turning text into numbers so a computer can tell that “web hosting” and “website server space” are about the same thing. It is what makes search by meaning possible rather than search by exact word.
Agentic Browsing
An AI navigating a website on somebody’s behalf: finding the price, checking availability, sometimes buying. Sites that rely on hover menus and unlabelled buttons are hard for an agent to use.
Model Drift
When a model gets worse over time because the world moved on and it did not. A pricing or demand model trained two years ago quietly stops matching how customers behave now.
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.