Explain / 14 words
The words, in plain English.
Every guide on this site tries to avoid jargon, but some words are unavoidable. Each one here gets a friend-in-the-pub explanation, a worked example you could picture happening, and the one thing people usually get wrong. In the guides, the first time a word appears it’s underlined; hover for the short version, click for this.
The AI words
What people mean when they say the AI “has an agent”, “cites you” or “uses an MCP”.
- What is an MCP?MCP · Model Context Protocol
A way to use a website or tool from inside your AI — and let the AI see a bit of what you’re doing there. An API, but inside your assistant.
- What is an API?API · Application Programming Interface
A tidy, structured way for one program to ask another for a piece of information — like pulling one cell out of someone else’s big spreadsheet.
- What is an AI agent?AI agent
An AI that follows instructions to go and do things — open websites, read, come back with results. You’re the queen bee; it’s the worker bee.
- What does it mean to be cited by an AI?Citation · Being cited by an AI
When an AI uses a snippet of your website in its answer and says where it got it — the same as listing your sources in an essay.
- What is SEO?SEO · Search Engine Optimisation
How Google and the other search engines decide who comes first when someone searches — and what you can do about it.
- What is an AI model?AI model · AI models
The trained “brain” an assistant runs on. GPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama are models; ChatGPT and Claude.ai are the apps around them. Some run on your own computer.
- What is AI automation?AI automation
Your AI doing the same job over and over without you — sorting, summarising, filing — so a task that took hours takes none of yours.
How a website works
The pieces you meet when an AI builds you a site — one small café website followed through every term, with what to set up for each.
- What is the front end of a website?Front end
The part of a website you can see and click in the browser: layout, text, buttons. Built from HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- What is the back end of a website?Back end
The part you never see: the program on a server that checks, saves and sends things when you press a button. Many small sites don’t need one.
- What is a database?Database
Where a website keeps the things that change — bookings, orders, posts. A spreadsheet a program reads and writes instead of a person.
- What is hosting?Hosting
The computer in a data centre that holds your site’s files and hands them to anyone who types your address. Free plans exist for small sites.
- What are Git and GitHub?Git & GitHub · Git and GitHub
Git keeps a history of every change to your files so nothing is lost; GitHub stores that history online so hosting and AI tools can read it. A “repo” is one project.
- What is storage on a website?Storage
Where the big files live — images, video, PDFs, uploads. Not the database (small facts) and not the site files themselves.
- What are website analytics?Analytics
The count of who visited, which pages, from where, and what they did — so you know whether anyone is reading.
A word missing? Email hello@howtogetaito.com and it gets added, in plain English.