Generative AI
AI that produces something new — text, images, code, audio — rather than only classifying or predicting. The generative part is why it can write an answer about your business instead of just linking to it.
Related terms
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”