April 11, 2025

Step-back Prompting

Learned a new term today: step-back prompting. It’s a technique I’ve used for awhile now but didn’t realize it had a name.

From Google’s new white paper on prompt engineering:

Step-back prompting is a technique for improving the performance by prompting the LLM to first consider a general question related to the specific task at hand, and then feeding the answer to that general question into a subsequent prompt for the specific task. This ‘step back’ allows the LLM to activate relevant background knowledge and reasoning processes before attempting to solve the specific problem.

As a simple example, instead of going straight to this prompt:

Write the hero section for this page on {{new product}} targeted at {{target audience}}

You’d do a two step process. First:

What are the fundamental principles of persuasive copywriting for the Hero section of a webpage?

Then:

Based on these principles {{p1 output}}, write the hero section for this page on {{new product}} targeted at {{target audience}}

Context is king.