Watermarking
Marking AI-generated content so it can be identified later, often invisibly. Part of the same effort as provenance, and equally early.
Related terms
Entity
A distinct thing a search engine can recognise: a company, a person, a place, a product. Being understood as an entity, rather than as a string of characters, is what lets you be recommended by name.
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.
Content Freshness
How recently a page was published or genuinely updated. It matters most for things that change — prices, availability, guidance — and matters little for things that do not.
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.
AI Content Detection
Tools that claim to identify AI-written text. Unreliable in both directions, and worth knowing about mainly because somebody may point one at your content and draw a confident wrong conclusion.
Topical Authority
Being recognised as a reliable source on a subject rather than on a single keyword, usually by covering it thoroughly and consistently. It is what makes a small site beat a bigger one in a narrow field.