Special Thanks

Special thanks for reviewing the draft of this book and making valuable suggestions:

1. Mariia Mironicheva
2. Zac Clifton https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliftonz/

About the authorEugene Mironichev is an experienced technical entrepreneur and the founder of the free, open-source tool AI Chat Watch. A core part of Eugene’s work since 2023 involves deeply researching how major AI engines are influencing user choices through brand and solution recommendations. This unique insight drives Eugene’s passion for understanding the deep technical workings and strategic impact of AI technologies.

You can reach out to Eugene on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mironic/ or by scanning the QR Code.

Glossary

• AI Overview: Google’s term for the AI-generated summaries and answers that appear directly within search results for certain queries, synthesizing information from multiple web sources.

• AI Search: Search engines or functionalities that utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), to understand query intent, process information from various sources (web pages, databases), and generate synthesized, often conversational, answers rather than just listing links. Examples include Perplexity AI, ChatGPT’s search features, and Google’s AI Overview.

• API (Application Programming Interface): A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate and exchange data with each other. In the context of search, APIs can be used for submitting sitemaps, requesting indexing, etc. (though some older Google APIs are deprecated).

• Common Crawl: A non-profit organization that maintains a massive, publicly accessible archive (petabytes) of web crawl data collected over many years. It is a foundational dataset used to train many Large Language Models (LLMs).

• Crawler / Bot / Spider: An automated software program used by search engines and AI companies to browse the World Wide Web, follow links, and collect data from web pages for indexing and analysis.

• CMS: Content-management system (Wordpress, Ghost, Wix, Drupal).

• CSR (Client-Side Rendering): A web development technique where the content of a webpage is primarily rendered in the user’s web browser using JavaScript, rather than on the web server. This can sometimes make it slower or more difficult for crawlers to index content compared to SSR (Server-Side Rendering).

• E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): A set of criteria outlined in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to evaluate the quality of webpage content. While applied by human raters, the underlying principles influence how Google’s algorithms assess content quality, and similar principles are relevant for AI training data quality.

• GEO - Generative Engine Optimization is a digital marketing strategy focused on making a brand’s content and brand mentions appear in the AI-generated responses of platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode.

• IndexNow: A protocol that allows websites to instantly notify participating search engines (like Bing, Yandex) whenever website content is created, updated, or deleted, enabling faster discovery and indexing.

• Indexing: The process by which search engines collect, analyze, and store data from web pages in a large database (the index). This allows the engine to quickly retrieve relevant pages when a user performs a search.

• JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data): A standard format for embedding structured data directly into a webpage’s HTML, typically using <script> tags. It allows website owners to explicitly describe their content (e.g., identify an article, product, event, or HowTo steps) in a machine-readable way, helping search engines and AI understand the meaning and context without complex parsing. Crucial for enabling rich results and improving content visibility to AI.

• LLM (Large Language Model): A type of artificial intelligence model trained on vast amounts of text data, capable of understanding natural language, generating human-like text, summarizing information, translating languages, and performing other language-based tasks. The core “brain” behind most generative AI and AI search tools.

• PAA (People Also Ask): A feature in Google search results that displays a box containing questions related to the user’s original query, along with brief answers often extracted from web pages.

• Robots.txt: A text file located in the root directory of a website that provides instructions (directives) to web crawlers about which pages or sections of the site they should or should not crawl/access. Compliance is voluntary.

• Schema.org: A collaborative community activity that creates, maintains, and promotes standardized schemas (vocabularies) for structured data on the internet. JSON-LD typically uses the Schema.org vocabulary to define data types and properties.

• Search Intent: The underlying goal or reason why a user performs a specific search query. Understanding intent (e.g., are they looking for information, trying to buy something, navigating to a specific site?) is crucial for creating relevant content and optimizing for AI search.

• Semantic Keywords: Words and phrases that are contextually related to the primary topic or keywords of a piece of content. Using semantic keywords helps search engines and AI better understand the nuances and topic cluster of the content.

• SSR (Server-Side Rendering): A web development technique where the HTML content of a web page is fully generated on the web server before being sent to the user’s browser or a crawler. This generally makes content easier and faster for crawlers to index compared to CSR.

• Structured Data: Code embedded in a webpage using a standardized format (like JSON-LD with Schema.org vocabulary) to provide explicit information about the page’s content and context, making it easier for machines (like search engines and AI) to understand.

• WDP mode: Web Discovery Project mode that can be enabled in Brave Browser and signals Brave Search engine to index websites which are browsed.

• Zero-Click Impact: The phenomenon where users get their answers or complete their tasks directly on the search engine results page (SERP) or within an AI chat interface, without needing to click through to an external website. This can lead to a reduction in organic traffic for websites.

History of Changes

October 18, 2025

• new illustrations added

• reviewed and updated

August 11, 2025

• reviewed and updated

May 5, 2025

• initial version