Listen: Prompt
The text given to a large language model to condition its response: the system instruction, context, retrieved documents, and user message the model reads before it generates.
Transcript
When we talk about a prompt in a large language model, we mean much more than just the question you type. A full prompt is a bundle of system instructions, the conversation history, and retrieved documents, all processed together.
This makes prompts very different from traditional search queries. A search query is usually just a few keywords. A prompt, however, is often a complete sentence or paragraph, and it can be phrased in countless different ways to achieve the same goal.
Because the entire prompt shapes the final response, what sits alongside the user's words matters just as much as the words themselves. Deliberately shaping this surrounding information is known as context engineering. By probing how a model responds across many of these controlled prompts, rather than chasing individual wordings, we can measure a brand's visibility in the world of artificial intelligence.