Predictive Analytics
Using historical data to estimate what will happen next: which customers will lapse, which stock will run out. Useful precisely to the degree that the past resembles the future.
Related terms
Neural Network
A system of simple connected units, loosely inspired by the brain, that learns patterns from examples rather than following rules somebody wrote. Nearly all modern AI is built on one.
Recommendation Engine
A system that suggests what somebody might want next based on behaviour — the “customers also bought” of an online shop. One of the oldest commercial uses of machine learning.
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.
Microdata
An older way of marking up facts, written as attributes on the HTML itself rather than in a separate block. Still understood, but JSON-LD is now the safer choice.
llms.txt
An emerging convention: a plain-text file at your site root that gives AI systems a clean map of what is on it. It saves an assistant from crawling around to work out what your site contains.
Answer Engine
An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are all answer engines. The old question was “do we rank?”; the new one is “are we the answer?”