Passage Ranking
When a search engine surfaces one relevant passage from a long page rather than judging the page as a whole. Clear headings are what make a passage findable in isolation.
Related terms
Function Calling
When a model, instead of answering from memory, asks to run a specific tool — look up a price, check stock — and uses the result. It is what turns a chat assistant into something that can act.
Guardrails
The limits placed on what an AI may say or do — refusing certain requests, staying on topic, never inventing a price. Essential on anything customer-facing.
Applebot-Extended
Apple’s equivalent, governing whether your content feeds Apple Intelligence. Ordinary Applebot, which powers Siri and Spotlight, is controlled separately.
PerplexityBot
Perplexity’s crawler. Perplexity cites its sources prominently, so being readable by it is one of the more direct routes to a visible citation.
Entity SEO
Optimising to be recognised as a specific, real thing rather than for particular keywords. In practice it means consistent naming, structured data, and being mentioned in enough other places to be corroborated.
AI Visibility
How often, and how accurately, AI assistants mention your business when someone asks about what you do. Unlike search rankings there is no official scoreboard, so it is measured by asking the assistants and by watching which crawlers visit.