Attention
A mechanism that weights which input representations matter while computing another representation.
What Attention does not show
A high internal weight is not a citation, explanation, or human-readable measure of causal importance.
Where Attention comes up on this site
- How to write an llms.txt and check it is actually servedA cited URL that 404s, or redirects somewhere else, spends the reader’s attention on a detour.
- How to measure AI visibility yourself: three checksIt is the only causal link available between work you did and attention you received.
- How to block AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBotThey exist because a real person is asking about you right now, and they are the cheapest attention on the internet: one page, in response to demand you already earned.
- State of AI visibility, October 2026: 139,788 homepagesFor all the attention it gets, an explicit AI-crawler block is uncommon.
- One 503 is not a blocked site: refusal or hiccup?That is why a hiccup still deserves attention, and why it deserves a different response from a block.
Terms this definition uses
Definitions that name Attention
Related terms in Models and generation
How a model produces text, what its training and decoding controls change, and what none of them can prove about a source.
Autoregressive model · Transformer · Self-attention · Parameter · Inference · Pretraining · Fine-tuning · Supervised fine-tuning · Instruction tuning · RLHF · Preference optimization · Knowledge distillation · Quantization · Mixture of experts · Multimodal model · Vision-language model · Small language model · Tokenizer · Temperature · Top-p sampling · Deterministic decoding · System prompt · Developer message · Tool call · Function calling · Structured output · Constrained decoding · Chain of thought · Reasoning trace · Context caching · Context compaction · Model routing · Model drift · Model version
Questions about Attention
What is Attention?
A mechanism that weights which input representations matter while computing another representation.
What does Attention not show or guarantee?
A high internal weight is not a citation, explanation, or human-readable measure of causal importance.
Which area of the glossary does Attention belong to?
Models and generation: How a model produces text, what its training and decoding controls change, and what none of them can prove about a source.
← Transformer · Self-attention →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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