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.
Related terms
AI Bias
When a system produces unfair results because its training data reflected an unfair world. It matters commercially as well as ethically: a biased model makes confidently wrong decisions about real people.
Multimodal
An AI that handles more than one kind of input — text and images together, say, or audio and video. It is why you can now photograph a menu and ask an assistant what is in a dish.
Zero-Click Search
A search where the person gets their answer on the results page and never visits a website. Common for opening hours, definitions and conversions — and increasingly common for everything else as AI answers grow.
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.
Applebot-Extended
Apple’s equivalent, governing whether your content feeds Apple Intelligence. Ordinary Applebot, which powers Siri and Spotlight, is controlled separately.
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?”