Temperature
A setting that controls how predictable an AI’s output is. Low temperature gives safe, repeatable answers; high temperature gives varied, more surprising ones — useful for ideas, risky for facts.
Related terms
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Answer Engine Optimization is the work of becoming the source that answers a question rather than one of ten links offered. It matters because search increasingly replies with a written answer, and only one or two businesses get named inside it.
User-Agent
The name a browser or bot gives when it requests a page. It is how a server tells Googlebot from ChatGPT from a person, and how robots.txt rules are addressed to one and not another.
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.
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?”
Semantic Search
Search that works on meaning rather than exact words, so a page can match a query it never literally contains. It is why writing naturally now beats repeating a keyword.
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.