# Glossary | AI Commerce Watch

Source: https://aicommercewatch.com/glossary/

### AI crawler

A bot operated by an AI company or answer engine that reads web pages to collect training data or ground live answers. Distinct from search crawlers in purpose and behavior.

### GPTBot

OpenAI's declared web crawler for training data collection. Controllable via robots.txt, though compliance is voluntary.

### Answer engine

An AI product that responds to questions with synthesized answers and citations - a growing product-discovery channel for ecommerce.

### Agentic commerce

Purchases researched and executed by AI agents acting on a user's behalf, compressing the shopping journey into machine-speed sessions.

### robots.txt

A sitewide text file stating which crawlers may access which paths. A statement of policy, not an enforcement mechanism - hostile or indifferent bots ignore it.

### Edge enforcement

Applying crawler and bot policy (allow, throttle, block) at the network edge in front of the storefront, where decisions execute before requests consume origin resources.