The vocabulary
of AI search

301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is the HTTP status code that says a URL has moved permanently — passing essentially all of the original page's link equity to the new URL.

302 Redirect

A 302 redirect tells engines that a URL is temporarily redirected — search engines keep indexing the original URL rather than transferring signals to the destination.

Agentic Search

Agentic search is the paradigm where an AI agent runs multiple searches and tool calls on the user's behalf, then synthesises a single answer.

Agentic Web

Agentic Web is the term for a web in which AI agents — not humans — are the primary actors browsing, parsing and acting on sites. It became part of the industry vocabulary through 2024 and 2025.

AutoGen is Microsoft Research's multi-agent framework, built around conversational agents that exchange messages and divide work between themselves.

Autonomous Agent

An autonomous agent runs with minimal human input — it decomposes the goal, executes, evaluates and iterates on its own until the task is done.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile that summarises an ideal target customer's demographics, behaviours, goals and pain points in a single, shareable form.

Bytespider

Bytespider is the web crawler operated by ByteDance, TikTok's parent — feeding its in-house AI models, search and recommendation systems.

Conversion rate (CVR) is the percentage of visitors or clicks that complete a defined goal — purchase, signup, lead form — and is the headline efficiency metric for most digital campaigns.

Dynamic rendering is the workaround of serving regular JavaScript-rendered pages to users while sending pre-rendered HTML to crawlers — historically a stopgap, increasingly discouraged.

An external link is an outbound link from your domain to another — and pointing to credible sources tends to act as a trust signal that supports your own content's authority.

F

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation is the filter-and-sort UX that multiplies URLs from a single catalog — extremely user-friendly, but a top cause of index bloat if left unmanaged.

FCP

FCP (First Contentful Paint) measures the moment any meaningful content — text or image — first appears on screen, used as a supporting page-speed metric alongside Core Web Vitals.

Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google extracts from a single page and pins to the top of the SERP — often called 'position zero'.

Few-shot Prompting

Few-shot prompting includes a small number of example inputs and outputs in the prompt itself, letting the LLM imitate the desired format or style without any retraining.

Fine-tuning

Fine-tuning takes an already pretrained LLM and trains it further on a narrower dataset to specialise it for a domain, task or voice — the most common path for adapting an LLM to your own data.

First-Party Data

First-party data is information you collect directly from your own customers and channels — the most reliable marketing asset in the post-cookie era.

Flywheel

The flywheel is a self-reinforcing growth model — happy customers fuel new acquisition — that HubSpot proposed as a replacement for the linear funnel.

Function Calling

Function calling is the interface that lets an LLM invoke predefined functions or APIs instead of just replying in natural language — the core mechanism behind AI agents.

Guest blogging is the classic link-building tactic of contributing content to other sites and earning a natural backlink to your own in the byline or body.

Hybrid search combines keyword (BM25) and vector retrieval to get the best of both — the default retrieval shape behind Perplexity-style answer engines and most production RAG.

Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages within the same domain — and it shapes crawl efficiency, how authority flows between pages, and how users move through the site.

International SEO

International SEO is the discipline of running a site across multiple countries and languages — keeping hreflang, domain structure and localisation aligned so each market gets the right version.

J

Jailbreak

A jailbreak is a prompt-level trick that bypasses an LLM's safety restrictions to force it into producing content the model is supposed to refuse.

JavaScript SEO

JavaScript SEO is the discipline of making sure JS-rendered pages get crawled and indexed correctly — usually via some combination of SSR, prerendering and hydration.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) is the JSON-based format used to embed Schema.org markup in a page — currently Google's recommended way to ship structured data.

JTBD (Jobs-to-Be-Done)

Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) reframes purchase as hiring: customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a specific job — a lens that surfaces motivations a feature list misses.

The Knowledge Panel is the SERP feature that surfaces entity info — brands, people, works — in a card on the right of the results, rendered directly from Google's Knowledge Graph.

LTV

Lifetime value (LTV) is the estimated total revenue — or profit — a single customer is expected to generate over the entire relationship with your business.

LTV:CAC Ratio

The LTV:CAC ratio compares lifetime value to acquisition cost — the single cleanest test of whether a growth engine has healthy unit economics.

A multimodal model is an LLM that can take in and reason over more than just text — typically combining images, audio or video alongside written prompts.

Multimodal Search

Multimodal search lets users query with images, audio or video alongside text — the new entry channel created by 'snap a photo and ask' user behaviour.

Net promoter score (NPS) asks users how likely they are to recommend the product on a 0–10 scale, then takes promoters minus detractors as a single loyalty number.

NRR

Net revenue retention (NRR) measures how much of last year's customer cohort revenue you've kept and grown a year later — the cleanest single read on SaaS business health.

An orphan page is a URL that no other page on the site links to — invisible to internal navigation and badly disadvantaged in discovery, evaluation and ranking.

Owned Media

Owned media is any channel your company directly controls — your website, blog, app, newsletter and customer accounts all count.

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting inputs that steer an LLM toward better outputs — a way to dramatically change result quality without retraining the model.

Prompt Injection

Prompt injection is an attack where instructions hidden in untrusted data override the system prompt and force the LLM into unintended behaviour.

Q

Q&A Format Content

Q&A format content puts the user's likely question in the heading and lands the answer immediately below — one of the cleanest patterns for AI answer engines to lift.

Quantization

Quantization compresses model weights to lower precision (say, 16-bit down to 4-bit) so the same model fits on smaller GPUs and runs more cheaply.

Query Decomposition

Query decomposition is the technique of breaking a complex question into smaller, easier sub-questions — a building block used widely across AI search and LLM reasoning.

Query Fan-Out

Query fan-out is the mechanism where an AI search engine expands a single user query into multiple sub-queries, runs them in parallel, then composes a single answer from the combined results.

Query Rewriting

Query rewriting is the step where the search system rephrases a user's prompt into a form better suited for retrieval — typically the first stage of an AI search pipeline.

robots.txt is the text file at a site's root that tells search engines and AI crawlers which paths they may or may not crawl — a long-standing web standard.

A system prompt is the instruction sent to an LLM before any user message, defining the assistant's role, tone and rules — effectively the AI product's character.

The Transformer is the neural network architecture behind almost every modern LLM, using self-attention to weigh relationships between all tokens in a sequence in parallel.

TTFB

TTFB (Time to First Byte) measures how long it takes from a request being sent until the first byte of the response arrives — a foundational metric for server responsiveness and LCP work.

UTM parameters are standardised query strings appended to URLs that label the source, medium and campaign so you can tell where each visit came from.

Voice search is the family of queries spoken to phones, speakers and cars — typically phrased as natural-language questions and answered with a single result.

W

Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Word-of-mouth marketing engineers the conditions for customers to recommend the brand naturally — turning the most trusted channel of all, peer recommendation, into a marketing engine.

X

X-Robots-Tag

X-Robots-Tag is the HTTP response header version of the meta robots directive — useful when you need to control indexing for non-HTML assets like PDFs, images and other binaries.

Y

YMYL

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) refers to topics — health, finance, safety, legal — where bad information can cause real-world harm, prompting Google to apply a higher trust bar.

You.com

You.com is an AI-search startup that blends generative answers, web results and embedded apps — answers appear alongside cited sources and inline widgets.

Z