Glossary/AI Search & Emerging

• Ad Context Protocol (AdCP)

  An open standard launched in October 2025, built on MCP, that gives AI agents a common language to discover, plan, buy, and report on media.

• Ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode

  Google Search, Shopping, and Performance Max ads that can appear inside or alongside AI-generated answers when a conversation has commercial intent.

• Agent Experience (AX)

  The holistic experience AI agents have discovering, choosing, and using a product or site, coined by Netlify's Mathias Biilmann in 2025 as the successor to UX/DX.

• Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

  Google's open protocol from 2025 that uses signed mandates to prove what a user authorized an AI agent to buy and pay for.

• Agent-Ready Website

  A site built so AI agents can reliably read product data, prices, and policies and complete actions like checkout.

• Agent-to-Agent Commerce

  Transactions negotiated between a shopper's AI agent and a merchant's AI agent, with humans setting goals and approvals.

• Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

  An open protocol launched by Google in 2025 that lets AI agents from different vendors discover each other, communicate, and coordinate tasks.

• Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP)

  IAB Tech Lab's umbrella of standards and open-source tools, named in 2026, for AI agents to plan, negotiate, and buy advertising.

• Agentic Audiences

  An IAB Tech Lab standard, formerly User Context Protocol, for how advertising agents exchange identity, contextual, and intent signals about audiences.

• Agentic Browser

  A web browser with a built-in AI agent, such as Perplexity Comet or ChatGPT Atlas, that can read pages, fill forms, and complete tasks for the user.

• Agentic Checkout

  A purchase completed by an AI agent on a shopper's behalf through a merchant's machine-readable checkout, rather than by the person clicking through a website.

• Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

  An open standard from OpenAI and Stripe, released in 2025, defining how AI agents share product feeds and complete checkouts with merchants.

• Agentic Media Buying

  Using AI agents to research inventory, build plans, negotiate deals, and launch and adjust campaigns with limited human input.

• Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF)

  An IAB Tech Lab standard, finalized in 2026, letting partners run containerized agents inside an exchange or DSP to act on the programmatic bidstream.

• Agentic Search

  AI search that plans and runs multiple searches, browses pages, and completes multi-step tasks rather than returning a single list of results.

• Agentic Tokens

  Payment card tokens issued specifically to an AI agent, scoped by limits and rules so the agent can pay without exposing the real card number.

• Agentic Traffic

  Website visits made by AI agents browsing on a person's behalf, which analytics and ad measurement must separate from human and bot traffic.

• AI Brand Mention

  An instance of an AI assistant naming a brand in the text of its answer, whether or not it links to the brand's site.

• AI Brand Safety

  Protecting a brand from AI-era risks: appearing beside AI slop, being misrepresented in AI answers, or running inaccurate auto-generated ads.

• AI Brand Sentiment

  How favorably AI assistants describe a brand when they mention it, tracked by AI visibility tools alongside mention and citation rates.

• AI Citation

  A source link or footnote an AI assistant attaches to its answer, showing which web page supported a statement.

• AI Content Licensing

  Deals or standards under which publishers are paid for letting AI companies train on or display their content.

• AI Crawler

  An automated bot, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, that fetches web pages to train AI models or answer users' questions in real time.

• AI Disclosure

  Labeling ads or content as AI-generated or AI-edited, increasingly required by platforms like Meta and TikTok and by laws and IAB guidance.

• AI Max for Search

  A one-click Google Ads feature suite launched in 2025 that uses AI to expand Search campaign matching beyond keywords and generate ad text.

• AI Referral Traffic

  Website visits that arrive by clicking links inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot, usually tracked as a separate analytics channel.

• AI Shopping Agent

  An AI assistant that researches, compares, and can buy products for a person based on their stated needs and preferences.

• AI Slop

  Low-quality, mass-produced AI-generated content published with little human review; in ads, it means off-brand or inaccurate generative creative that erodes trust.

• AI Washing

  Overstating or inventing a product's use of artificial intelligence in marketing claims, a practice regulators such as the SEC and FTC have pursued.

• Alexa for Shopping (formerly Rufus)

  Amazon's generative AI shopping assistant, launched as Rufus in 2024 and renamed in May 2026, that answers product questions, compares items, and can auto-buy.

• Answer Engine

  A search tool that responds with a direct, synthesized answer rather than a ranked list of links, such as ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode.

• Applebot-Extended

  Apple's robots.txt control token that lets publishers stop Applebot-crawled content being used to train Apple Intelligence models while staying in Siri and Spotlight search.

• Apps in ChatGPT

  Interactive third-party apps, built with OpenAI's MCP-based Apps SDK since 2025, that brands like Expedia and Zillow run inside ChatGPT conversations.

• Bing AI Performance Report

  Bing Webmaster Tools report showing how often a site is cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI answers, with cited pages and sample grounding queries.

• Brand AI Agent

  An AI agent a business deploys to represent its products, answer questions, and sell to customers or to other AI agents.

• Buyer Agent

  An AI agent working for an advertiser or agency that finds inventory, evaluates proposals, and executes media buys against a campaign brief.

• ChatGPT Ads

  OpenAI's advertising product, tested from February 2026, showing labeled sponsored units below ChatGPT answers for Free and Go users, matched to conversation context.

• ChatGPT Agent (Agent Mode)

  ChatGPT capability, succeeding Operator, that uses its own virtual computer to browse, fill forms, and complete multi-step tasks on a user's behalf.

• ChatGPT Product Feed

  A structured file of product data merchants submit to OpenAI under its feed specification so their catalog appears accurately in ChatGPT shopping results.

• ChatGPT Search

  ChatGPT's built-in web search that pulls live results into conversational answers with cited sources, making it a growing discovery channel for brands.

• ChatGPT Shopping

  ChatGPT's product discovery experience that shows organic, unsponsored product cards, prices, and merchant links in answers to shopping questions.

• ChatGPT-User

  OpenAI user agent that fetches a page live when a person or custom GPT asks ChatGPT to visit it; OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply.

• Citation Rate

  The share of tracked AI answers that cite at least one of a brand's URLs, a core KPI for measuring AI search performance.

• Claude-SearchBot

  Anthropic crawler that indexes web content to improve Claude's search results; blocking it can reduce a site's visibility and citations in Claude answers.

• ClaudeBot

  Anthropic's training crawler; restricting it signals that a site's future content should be excluded from Claude model training datasets.

• Comet Plus

  Perplexity's $5 subscription, launched 2025, that shares 80% of revenue with publishers based on human visits, AI citations, and agent actions.

• Computer-Using Agent (CUA)

  An AI agent that operates a computer or browser like a person, seeing the screen and clicking and typing to complete tasks on websites.

• Content Chunking

  Structuring pages into self-contained sections with clear headings and direct answers so AI systems can extract and cite individual passages.

• Content Signals Policy

  Cloudflare's 2025 robots.txt extension letting sites state yes/no preferences for three uses of their content: search, ai-input, and ai-train.

• Conversational Advertising

  Ads served inside AI chat experiences and matched to the meaning of the conversation rather than to typed keywords.

• Conversational Search

  Searching through multi-turn dialogue with an AI, where follow-up questions build on earlier context instead of starting a new query each time.

• Copilot Checkout

  Microsoft's in-chat purchasing in Copilot, launched January 2026 with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe, where the merchant stays seller of record.

• Copilot Merchant Program

  Microsoft program, launched 2025, letting retailers feed product data to Copilot so their items can be recommended and tracked in AI shopping answers.

• Crawl-to-Referral Ratio

  How many pages an AI company's bots crawl for every visitor they send back, used to judge whether AI crawling benefits publishers.

• Deep Research

  An AI assistant mode that runs dozens or hundreds of searches and reads many sources to produce a long, cited report on a question.

• Delegated Payment

  Passing a limited, single-purpose payment token through an AI agent so it can pay a merchant without ever seeing the shopper's full card details.

• Direct Offers

  A Google Ads feature announced in 2026 that shows exclusive retailer promotions to shoppers during AI Mode conversations, with Google deciding when to display them.

• Entity Optimization

  Making a brand, product, or person clearly and consistently defined across the web so search engines and AI models recognize it as a distinct entity.

• GA4 AI Assistant Channel

  A GA4 default channel, added May 2026, grouping visits referred by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot; AI Overviews clicks stay in Organic Search.

• Gemini in Chrome

  Google's Gemini assistant built into the Chrome browser, able to summarize pages, answer questions across tabs, and increasingly take agentic actions.

• Generative AI Performance Report (Search Console)

  Google Search Console report showing how often a site's links received impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, rolled out worldwide in August 2026.

• Google AI Mode

  Google's conversational search mode, powered by Gemini, that answers complex multi-part questions with a synthesized response and source links instead of a list of results.

• Google Search Live

  An AI Mode feature for real-time voice conversation with Google Search, optionally sharing the phone camera so Search can answer about what it sees.

• Google Shopping Graph

  Google's AI-refreshed dataset of 50+ billion product listings with prices, reviews, and stock that powers shopping in Search, AI Mode, and Gemini.

• Google Universal Cart

  A Google shopping cart launched in the US in 2026 that lets people save and buy products from multiple retailers across Search and Gemini.

• Google-Extended

  A robots.txt control token, not a separate crawler, that lets sites opt out of Gemini and Vertex AI training without affecting Google Search or AI Overviews.

• GPTBot

  OpenAI's training crawler; blocking it in robots.txt opts a site's content out of training OpenAI's foundation models without affecting ChatGPT search visibility.

• Grounding (Search Grounding)

  Connecting an AI model's answer to retrieved, up-to-date sources such as live search results, reducing hallucinations and producing citations.

• HTTP 402 / x402

  An open payment standard, created by Coinbase, that revives the web's 402 Payment Required code so agents and apps can pay per request, often in stablecoins.

• IETF AI Preferences (AIPREF)

  An IETF working group developing a standard vocabulary for publishers to express how automated systems may use their content, including AI training.

• Instant Checkout

  A ChatGPT feature launched in 2025 with Stripe that let US users buy from participating merchants without leaving the chat, built on ACP.

• Know Your Agent (KYA)

  Verifying an AI agent's identity, operator, and permissions before letting it browse, transact, or access data, modeled on Know Your Customer checks.

• Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO)

  Optimizing content and brand signals so large language models understand, cite, and recommend a brand, both in live answers and in what models learned during training.

• LLM Seeding

  Placing accurate brand information in sources that AI models cite or learn from, such as reviews, forums, and listicles, to influence AI recommendations.

• Machine Customer

  A Gartner term for a non-human economic actor, such as an AI agent, that obtains goods or services in exchange for payment.

• Markdown for Agents

  Cloudflare feature that serves AI agents a clean Markdown version of a web page instead of HTML, making content cheaper and easier for agents to read.

• Mastercard Agent Pay

  Mastercard's agentic payments program, announced in 2025, that lets registered AI agents pay with agent-specific tokens tied to verified user intent.

• Model Context Protocol (MCP)

  An open standard introduced by Anthropic in 2024 that lets AI models connect to external tools, data, and apps through a common interface.

• NLWeb

  A Microsoft-led open protocol from 2025 that adds a natural-language interface to websites, letting people and AI agents query site content conversationally.

• OAI-SearchBot

  OpenAI's search crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT search; sites that block it won't appear as cited sources in ChatGPT search answers.

• Pay Per Crawl

  A Cloudflare feature launched in 2025 that lets site owners charge verified AI crawlers a set fee per page, block them, or allow free access.

• Perplexity Merchant Program

  Free Perplexity program where retailers share product data to improve their chances of being recommended and enable one-click checkout; placement cannot be bought.

• PerplexityBot

  Perplexity's crawler that indexes pages so they can be surfaced and cited in Perplexity answers; it is not used for foundation-model training.

• Product Feed Optimization

  Improving product titles, attributes, prices, and availability data so products are selected and accurately described by shopping engines and AI assistants.

• Prompt Tracking

  Monitoring a fixed set of buyer-style prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, and others to see how often and how a brand appears.

• Prompt Volume

  An AI visibility tool's estimate of how often people ask AI assistants about a prompt or topic; modeled and directional rather than exact.

• Query Fan-Out

  An AI search technique that splits one question into many related sub-queries, runs them in parallel, and merges the results into a single answer.

• Really Simple Licensing (RSL)

  An open standard, finalized in 2025, that adds machine-readable licensing and payment terms for AI use to a site's robots.txt.

• Seller Agent

  An AI agent working for a publisher or platform that answers buyer agents with available inventory, audiences, pricing, and proposals.

• Sponsored Agents

  A ChatGPT ad format in alpha testing from September 2026 that lets users open a labeled conversation with a brand's AI agent after clicking an ad.

• Sponsored Follow-Up Questions

  Perplexity's 2024 ad format that placed brand-sponsored suggested questions beside AI answers; the program was wound down by early 2026.

• Synthetic Performer

  An AI-generated person used in an ad; New York began requiring advertisers to disclose synthetic performers in June 2026.

• Training Crawler vs. Retrieval Crawler

  The split between bots that collect content to train models and bots that fetch content to answer and cite queries in real time.

• Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP)

  Visa's 2025 protocol that lets approved AI agents sign their requests so merchants can tell legitimate shopping agents from malicious bots.

• Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

  Google's open standard, launched in 2026, for AI agents to handle discovery, checkout, and post-purchase support with merchants across AI Mode and Gemini.

• Verifiable Intent

  A signed, checkable record of what a person authorized an AI agent to buy, such as spending limits and allowed merchants.

• Vibe Coding

  Andrej Karpathy's 2025 term for building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting AI write the code.

• Vibe Marketing

  A 2025 coinage for one marketer directing AI tools and agents to produce, test, and run campaigns that once needed a full team, while keeping strategy and taste.

• Virtual Try-On

  AI shopping feature, notably in Google Search, that shows apparel on the shopper's own uploaded photo to aid purchase decisions.

• Visa Intelligent Commerce

  Visa's program giving AI agents agent-specific payment tokens and controls so they can buy on a cardholder's behalf within set limits.

• Web Bot Auth

  A method for bots and AI agents to cryptographically sign their web requests so sites can verify who they are and treat them accordingly.

• Web Guide

  A Google Search Labs experiment that uses a custom Gemini model and query fan-out to group web results into AI-organized themes.