Synthetic Content
Text, images or video produced by AI. Not penalised for being synthetic, but it is judged by the same standard as anything else — and thin AI-written pages fail that standard easily.
Related terms
Content Provenance
A record of where a piece of content came from and how it was made, sometimes attached to the file itself. Emerging as a way to tell an original photograph from a generated one.
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.
sameAs
A structured-data property that links your business to its profiles elsewhere — Facebook, LinkedIn, a directory. It is how a model confirms you exist in more than one place, which makes it far likelier to name you.
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.
Google-Extended
The robots.txt setting that controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini and AI Overviews. It is separate from ordinary Google Search, so you can allow one and refuse the other.
Content Signals
An extension to robots.txt that states not just who may crawl, but what they may do with what they find: appear in search, be quoted in answers, be used as training data. It lets you permit citation while refusing training.