Glossary
Agentic Findability Glossary
The vocabulary of AI agents, answer engines, and machine-readable findability — explained in plain language, with why each one matters for being found by AI.
Core concepts
Agentic Findability
The degree to which a website can be discovered, understood, and trusted by AI agents acting on behalf of users.
Read definition →AI Agent
An autonomous AI system that can browse the web, read content, and take actions on a user's behalf.
Read definition →Answer Engine
A system that responds to a query with a synthesised answer instead of a list of links.
Read definition →Generative AI
AI that creates new content — text, images, code, or audio — rather than only classifying or ranking existing data.
Read definition →Large Language Model (LLM)
An AI model trained on vast amounts of text that predicts and generates human-like language.
Read definition →Optimisation disciplines
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Optimising content to be selected, cited, and surfaced by answer engines.
Read definition →Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Optimising content so it is used and represented well by AI systems that generate answers.
Read definition →Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in traditional search engine results.
Read definition →Technical signals & files
Crawler (Bot)
An automated program that visits and reads web pages, used by search engines and AI companies to gather content.
Read definition →Entity
A clearly identified person, business, place, or concept that AI systems can recognise and reason about.
Read definition →JSON-LD
The recommended format for embedding structured data in a page, written as a small block of JSON.
Read definition →Knowledge Graph
A network of entities and the relationships between them that AI and search systems use to "know" facts about the world.
Read definition →llms.txt
A machine-readable text file at /llms.txt that gives AI systems a concise, structured overview of your website.
Read definition →robots.txt
A file at /robots.txt that tells crawlers and AI bots which parts of your site they may access.
Read definition →Schema Markup (Schema.org)
A shared vocabulary, maintained at Schema.org, for describing things like organisations, people, products, and reviews.
Read definition →Structured Data
Standardised, machine-readable labels added to a page that describe what its content actually means.
Read definition →How AI works
Citation
A reference an answer engine includes to credit and link the source it drew an answer from.
Read definition →Grounding
Anchoring an AI's answer to verifiable source material so it reflects real facts rather than invention.
Read definition →Hallucination
When an AI states something false or invented with apparent confidence.
Read definition →Inference
The moment an AI model actually runs to produce an output from a given input.
Read definition →Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open standard that lets AI agents connect to external tools, data, and services in a consistent way.
Read definition →Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
A technique where an AI fetches relevant external documents and uses them to ground its answer.
Read definition →Vector Embedding
A numerical representation of text that lets AI measure how similar two pieces of meaning are.
Read definition →