Prompt

A prompt is the text a person or a program gives a language model to work from: a question, an instruction, a document, or all three together. The answer is a continuation of the prompt, so everything the model says is shaped by what the prompt contained.

What a prompt holds

More than the question typed. A system prompt from the product’s maker sets the role and the rules. The user’s message follows. When the assistant has web retrieval, the pages it fetches are placed into the prompt as well, before the answer is written; Anthropic’s documentation of Claude’s web search tool describes the model deciding to search, the results being provided back to it, and the final answer carrying citations to those results. A business’s web page, at the moment it is fetched, is part of a stranger’s prompt.

Prompt and query

A search query is a few words matched against an index. A prompt is a sentence or a paragraph with context around it, and one prompt can produce several searches before an answer is written; the same documentation says the search step can repeat within a single request. A query returns a list. A prompt returns an answer with some names in it.

Why the phrasing matters to a business

Two prompts that a person would call the same question can retrieve different pages and name different businesses. That is why this site measures against a panel of buyer questions, worded the way a buyer words them, rather than one question, and asks the same panel again once the fixes are live, and every month with monitoring. The methodology page sets out the panel.

A common question

Why does the wording of a question change which businesses get named?

Two questions a person would call the same can retrieve different pages and end with different names in the answer. A prompt is more than the sentence typed: a system prompt from the product's maker sets the role and the rules, the user's message follows, and with retrieval the fetched pages are placed into the prompt before the answer is written. One prompt can also set off several searches within a single request. This site therefore measures against a panel of buyer questions, worded the way a buyer words them, and asks the same panel each time: before the fixes, once they are live, and every month with monitoring.

Sources

Search and citation behavior: Anthropic, web search tool.