Author Authority
The weight given to content because of who wrote it. Advice attributed to a named person with a real background is treated very differently from advice signed by a company or by nobody.
Related terms
AI Agent
An AI that does things rather than only answering — browsing a site, filling a form, completing a booking. It is why websites are starting to be judged on whether a machine can use them, not only read them.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A technique where the AI first searches a set of documents, then writes its answer from what it found. It is how assistants quote current information rather than whatever was in their training data.
Markdown
A plain-text way of writing formatted documents using symbols like # for a heading. AI systems read it easily because the structure is unambiguous, which is why some sites now offer it alongside HTML.
Guardrails
The limits placed on what an AI may say or do — refusing certain requests, staying on topic, never inventing a price. Essential on anything customer-facing.
Reinforcement Learning
Training by trial, error and reward rather than by examples. It is how models are tuned to be helpful and to refuse things they should refuse.
AI Crawler
A bot that reads websites on behalf of an AI company, either to build an index or to answer a live question. They arrive under their own names and obey robots.txt, so you can decide which are welcome.