Glossary
The terms, in plain words.
What the web-data and AI-agent words mean, and where they show up in Webfold.
Terms.
- Boilerplate
- The parts of a page that are not its content: menus, headers, footers, cookie banners, related links and ads.
- CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol)
- The protocol Playwright and Puppeteer use to control a browser. Webfold implements a subset so those tools can connect to it. Learn more →
- Chunking
- Splitting a long text into pieces of a set size for indexing and retrieval. Learn more →
- Headless browser
- A browser that runs without a visible window, used to load pages and run their scripts from a program. Learn more →
- HTML to Markdown
- Turning a web page's markup into plain Markdown text, keeping headings, lists, tables and links, and dropping scripts and layout. Learn more →
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open protocol that lets an AI assistant call external tools. Webfold ships an MCP server. Learn more →
- OCR
- Optical character recognition: reading text out of an image, such as a scanned PDF page. Learn more →
- Page furniture (chrome)
- Another name for boilerplate that repeats across the pages of a site. Webfold counts repeated blocks across a crawl and drops them. Learn more →
- Prompt injection
- Hidden or hostile text on a page that tries to steer a model that reads it. Extraction does not remove it, so treat fetched text as untrusted. Learn more →
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- Giving a language model relevant passages from your own data at question time. It depends on clean, well-chunked source text. Learn more →
- robots.txt
- A file where a site states which automated visitors may fetch which paths. Polite crawlers read it first.
- SERP
- A search engine results page. Webfold parses each engine's results into one common shape. Learn more →
- Sitemap
- A file where a site lists its pages, often with last-changed dates. Faster than crawling when it exists. Learn more →
- Token efficiency
- Giving a model only the text it needs, so you pay for fewer tokens. Removing page furniture is the first step.
- WARC
- The standard file format for web archives. It stores each request and response so a page can be examined or replayed later. Learn more →
- Web crawler
- A program that follows links from a starting page to discover and fetch many pages of a site. Learn more →