Grounding
Giving an AI real source material to answer from, instead of letting it rely on memory. A grounded answer can be checked and cited; an ungrounded one is where hallucinations come from.
Related terms
AI Citation
When an assistant names your website as the source of something it said, usually with a link. A citation is the AI-era equivalent of a first-page ranking — it is the thing worth competing for.
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.
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 Search
Searching by asking a question in ordinary language and getting a written reply, rather than typing keywords and choosing from links. It changes what a website has to do: be readable and quotable by a machine, not just findable.
Vector Database
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly. It is the part of an AI search system that decides which of your pages is relevant to a question.
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.