Agentic Search

Agentic search happens when an AI agent researches and selects information on a user's behalf: running its own sub-queries, evaluating multiple sources, and delivering a synthesized recommendation, rather than a human directly reading and judging a results page themselves.

Why it matters

As agents take over more of the research step, content has to be legible not just to a person skimming a page, but to a system chaining several retrieval steps together before it ever produces a visible answer. A page that's clear to a human but structurally ambiguous to a parser can still get skipped.

Related terms

• Generative Engine

  A generative engine is an AI system, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews, that answers a query by synthesizing one direct response from multiple retrieved sources, instead of returning a ranked list of links for the user to click through themselves.

• Conversational Search

  Conversational search is a natural-language search interaction where a user asks a question the way they'd ask a person, and receives one synthesized answer instead of a page of ranked links. It's the interface pattern behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode.