HowTo Schema
Markup for step-by-step instructions, labelling each step in order. Useful for anything procedural, and easy for an assistant to reproduce accurately.
Related terms
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.
Microdata
An older way of marking up facts, written as attributes on the HTML itself rather than in a separate block. Still understood, but JSON-LD is now the safer choice.
Fine-Tuning
Taking a general model and training it further on your own examples so it follows your tone or handles your particular task. Useful when prompting alone keeps producing nearly-right answers.
Knowledge Graph
A map of things and how they relate — this company, its founder, its address, its services. Search engines and AI systems use one to know that two mentions of a name refer to the same business.
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.
Markdown
A plain-text way of writing formatted documents using symbols like # for a heading. AI systems read it easily because the structure is unambiguous, which is why some sites now offer it alongside HTML.