Multi-hop Query
A multi-hop query is a question that can't be answered from one fact or one page, because the answer depends on linking several pieces of information in steps. Yixuan Tang and Yi Yang, who built a 2024 test set of these questions, describe them as needing several pieces of supporting evidence found and reasoned over together.
Source: Tang and Yang, MultiHop-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-Hop Queries (arXiv, January 2024), checked October 29, 2026
What Multi-hop Query means for your business
Each step is a hop, and the answer to one step is what you look up in the next. Say someone asks, as a made-up example, "Who services the brand of heat pump the last owner put in my house?" Step one finds the brand, from the paperwork or the home listing. Step two finds who services that brand nearby.
Researchers handle these by searching more than once, using what one search finds to make the next one. Some papers call this multi-step retrieval. Tang and Yang found the AI setups they tested did poorly on these questions. Google says AI Mode breaks a question into subtopics and runs many searches at once, which we read as one way of coping with them.
We'd put the facts a buyer combines on your own pages, in plain view: the brands you service, the areas you cover, how you charge. When they're split across a PDF, a social post and an old blog page, there are more places for one step to come up empty.
If buyers ask layered questions and AI answers name businesses that spell out more than you do, putting every one of those facts on your own pages is how our answer engine work helps.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview treated the term as an AI engineering idea and cited research papers, YouTube lectures, Medium posts and a chatbot company's blog. ChatGPT walked through a two-step question about a tech company's owner and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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