Glossary
Conversational Search
Conversational search is information seeking through multi-turn dialogue with an AI assistant instead of one-shot keyword queries. Context carries across turns, so a buyer can narrow from 'best CRM' to team size, budget, and integrations within one session — meaning brands are evaluated against increasingly specific criteria that keyword tools never see.
The unit of conversational search is the session, not the query. A buyer's third turn — 'which of those works for a EU-based fintech with HubSpot?' — inherits everything established earlier, producing evaluation criteria far more specific than any tracked keyword. Vendors get filtered out mid-conversation for missing facts no landing page was ever asked to state.
This changes content strategy: the winning pages are the ones that let an engine keep answering as constraints accumulate — explicit statements about company sizes served, regions, compliance, integrations, and pricing tiers. Vague positioning survives turn one and dies on turn three.
It also changes measurement. Monitoring only single-shot prompts understates the risk, so mature prompt sets include constrained follow-up variants that approximate how real sessions narrow toward a shortlist.
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Perciva runs buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude and shows you the answers verbatim — including which competitor gets recommended instead of you.
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