Passage indexing is an approach in which a search engine evaluates and displays individual parts of a longer document separately, independently of the topic of the page as a whole. Thanks to it, a single specific paragraph from an extensive article can make it into the answer, even though the article as a whole does not target that query at all. In generative search this mechanism is even more pronounced, because the model takes passages, not entire pages, into its context. Writing for passage indexing means building the text out of self-contained units: a heading phrased as a question or a precise label, followed directly by a direct answer in the first sentence, and only then the elaboration. Stable heading identifiers help, so that a part of the page can be linked to directly, and so does consistently repeating the key entity instead of using pronouns, which lose their meaning once taken out of context.
See also: Content chunking, Query fan-out, Reranking.
