C-SEO Bench: Does Conversational SEO Work?

Abstract

With the rise of conversational search engines like Perplexity, a new discipline of “Conversational Search Engine Optimization” (C-SEO) emerged in 2024-2025. These new strategies claim that writing articles in a certain way can boost their inclusion in AI-generated answers. We built C-SEO Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark covering 6 domains and multi-actor scenarios, to test these claims. The results are definitive and disappointing: none of the new C-SEO strategies are effective. We expect that traditional SEO approaches will continue to provide much more significant results, indicating that the development of effective C-SEO methods requires more work.