Tool Use
An AI reaching outside itself to do something it cannot do alone: run a search, do arithmetic reliably, read a live page. Nearly every useful assistant depends on it.
Related terms
Conversational Search
Searching by asking a full question, often as a follow-up to a previous one, the way you would ask a person. It favours pages that answer plainly over pages stuffed with keywords.
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?”
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.
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.
Transformer
The model architecture behind almost every modern AI system, introduced in 2017. Its trick is paying attention to how every word in a passage relates to every other, which is what made fluent machine writing possible.
Inference
The moment an AI actually answers, as opposed to when it was trained. Training happens once and costs a fortune; inference happens every time somebody asks, and is what you pay for per use.