Grounding
Giving an AI real source material to answer from, instead of letting it rely on memory. A grounded answer can be checked and cited; an ungrounded one is where hallucinations come from.
Related terms
AI Readiness
Whether a website can be reached, understood and quoted by AI assistants. It covers crawler access, structured data, clear headings, published contact details and speed — the unglamorous things that decide whether a model will name you.
Structured Data Testing
Checking that your markup is valid and says what you meant. Worth doing after every template change, because broken structured data usually fails silently rather than visibly.
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.
Search Intent
What somebody actually wants when they type a query: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a specific site. Matching it matters more than matching the words.
AI Referral Traffic
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Usually small in number and unusually well-qualified, because they clicked after reading a recommendation.
Token
The unit an AI reads and writes in — roughly three quarters of a word. Models are priced and limited by tokens, which is why very long documents cost more and sometimes get truncated.