core
Training data
The corpus a model was trained on — distinct from the live web it retrieves citations from at query time.
Definition
Training data is the static corpus used to pre-train or fine-tune a language model. Common Crawl, books, code, web pages — frozen at a cutoff date. Engines reference training data for general knowledge but cite the live web (RAG) for current facts, comparisons, and product info. The GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended user-agents are training crawlers; the *SearchBot variants are retrieval crawlers.
Example
Claude's training data has a cutoff (e.g. April 2024). For 'best CRM 2026' Claude invokes web tool — the cited sources are live retrievals, not training data.How to optimize
Be in both. Allow training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) AND retrieval bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot). The training presence helps with brand recognition; the retrieval presence wins citations.