Vector Database
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly. It is the part of an AI search system that decides which of your pages is relevant to a question.
Related terms
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.
AI Share of Voice
How often your business is named when assistants are asked about your category, compared with competitors. There is no official figure, so it is measured by asking the same questions repeatedly and counting.
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?”
Human-in-the-Loop
Keeping a person in the decision, either approving what the AI produced or handling the cases it flags. The usual sensible middle ground between doing everything by hand and trusting a machine completely.
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.
NLP (Natural Language Processing)
The field concerned with computers handling human language: understanding it, generating it, translating it. Everything from spam filters to chat assistants sits somewhere in it.