Crawl Budget
The rough limit on how much of your site a crawler will fetch in a visit. Slow pages and endless near-duplicate URLs spend it on nothing, so the pages that matter get visited less often.
Related terms
Watermarking
Marking AI-generated content so it can be identified later, often invisibly. Part of the same effort as provenance, and equally early.
JSON-LD
The format Google and the AI assistants prefer for structured data — a block of machine-readable facts tucked into the page. It states plainly what prose only implies: this is the business, this is the address, this is the price.
AI Referral Traffic
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Usually small in number and unusually well-qualified, because they clicked after reading a recommendation.
AI Brand Mention
Your business being named in an AI answer, with or without a link. Worth tracking separately from traffic, because a mention can win the customer without ever producing a click.
Inference
The moment an AI actually answers, as opposed to when it was trained. Training happens once and costs a fortune; inference happens every time somebody asks, and is what you pay for per use.
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing instructions that get reliable results from an AI — being specific, giving examples, saying what to avoid. Less mysterious than it sounds, and mostly the same skill as briefing a new colleague well.