Embedding
A way of turning words, sentences, or whole documents into numbers that capture their meaning — so that similar ideas end up mathematically 'close together.' This is what makes AI search smarter than keyword matching. When you search for "how to cancel my subscription," an embedding-based search also finds results about "unsubscribing" or "stopping a plan" because their meanings are similar, even if the exact words differ. You don't work with embeddings directly — they power the smart search happening behind the scenes.
In practice
You want Claude to search your internal wiki by meaning, not just keywords. Each wiki page gets converted into a list of numbers — an embedding — that captures its meaning mathematically. When you search "what's our refund policy," the search finds pages with similar meaning, not just pages containing those words.
Related concepts