PromptScoutWhat is Conversational Search?
Conversational Search is a search interaction where users ask follow-up questions in natural language and the system maintains context across turns. Conversational Search is commonly implemented through chat-style interfaces and AI-generated answers.
Quick definition
Conversational Search is search that works like a dialogue, with follow-up questions and context.
How Conversational Search works
- Conversational Search systems interpret query intent across multiple turns.
- Conversational Search systems often rewrite or expand queries to retrieve relevant sources.
- Conversational Search systems generate answers that incorporate the current question and prior context.
- Conversational Search can reduce clicks when answers are complete in the interface.
Why Conversational Search matters
Conversational Search matters because the unit of optimization becomes the answer, not only a ranked link.
Conversational Search affects:
- how users discover brands and content through LLM answers
- how contextual relevance and trust signals influence answer selection
- how prompt-based measurement can be used to track visibility over time
Example use cases
- Monitoring how answers change as a user asks follow-up questions about pricing or constraints.
- Creating pages that contain definitions and step-by-step sections that are easy to extract.
- Mapping multiple query intent variants to different sections of the same topic.