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.
Related terms
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?”
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.
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.
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.
Context Window
How much text a model can hold in mind at once, counted in tokens. Anything beyond it is forgotten, which is why very long conversations start to lose earlier details.
AI Share of Voice
How often your business is named when assistants are asked about your category, compared with competitors. There is no official figure, so it is measured by asking the same questions repeatedly and counting.