AI Surveys Overview

Send targeted surveys, collect conversational responses with AI follow-ups, and turn them into signals alongside the rest of your feedback

AI Surveys (/surveys) is BuildBetter’s native survey product. You build a survey, target an audience using the same signal filters you use everywhere else, deliver it by email or inside your own app, and let an AI ask clarifying follow-up questions when an answer is thin. Completed responses flow into the same signal tables as calls, documents, and imported feedback.

AI Surveys is gated by the organization-level surveys feature flag. When it is off, authenticated survey mutations are rejected, the survey worker holds pending invitations instead of sending them, and public respondent links return Survey not found.

Three Ways Responses Arrive

BuildBetter treats all three as the same kind of data once collected:

Path	How it works	Best for
Imported	Responses synced from a provider like Typeform or Pendo	Surveys you already run elsewhere
Native email / URL	Built and sent from BuildBetter, answered on a hosted respondent page	Targeted outreach to known people
Native in-app	Delivered through the installed BuildBetter feedback widget	Catching users in product context

Imported surveys stay readable in BuildBetter but are not editable here — edit those in the source tool.

How the Pieces Fit

Every collection path converges on the same records:

survey -> survey_version -> survey_question -> survey_response -> survey_response_answer

The important consequence: questions are versioned and immutable once sent. When you add a recipient, that recipient is pinned to the survey_version that existed at the time. Editing questions later creates a new version and does not retroactively change what an in-flight respondent sees, or how their answers are interpreted.

Completed non-preview responses are queued for signal extraction, so they show up in Signals, extraction tables, and datasets exactly like any other source.

The Lifecycle

1. Create

   Start from a template or build your own. Pick question types, write descriptions, and decide which questions allow AI follow-ups. See Creating Surveys.

2. Target

   Build the audience with the Signals v2 filter builder, review the matched people with their matching evidence, and approve who gets added. See Audience & Delivery.

3. Brand and preview

   Set theme, primary color, logo, intro copy, and thank-you copy. Preview renders the real respondent page. See Branding & Respondent Experience.

4. Activate

   Activation queues invitations for pending recipients and surfaces the estimated credit exposure before you commit.

5. Read the results

   Watch delivery and respondent progress, open individual responses with their full AI follow-up history, and connect the survey to a View so its signals join that analysis. See Responses & Signals.

What Makes It Different

Targeting is signal-led, not list-led. The primary way to build an audience is to describe who you want in signal terms — the same fields, nested rules, custom person and company properties, and hierarchy filters available on the Signals page. BuildBetter returns matched people with the signals that matched them, so you can audit why someone is in the audience before you send. Manual email entry exists for one-offs, but it is not the main model.

Follow-ups are model-decided, not scripted. When a question allows follow-ups and an answer is low-detail, a model decides whether a clarifying question is worth asking. It may ask zero. There is no canned fallback prompt — if the model declines or fails, the answer simply saves and the respondent moves on.

Responses and signals are counted separately. “Responses received” and “signals generated” are different outcomes and the UI keeps them distinct, so a survey that collected 40 responses but produced few signals is visible as exactly that.

Where to Go Next

Creating Surveys

Templates, question types and variants, and AI follow-up configuration.

Audience & Delivery

Signal-led targeting, email and in-app channels, throttles, and suppression.

Responses & Signals

Reading responses, follow-up history, and routing signals into Views.

Branding & Respondent Experience

Theme, color, logo, intro and completion copy, and what respondents see.

Settings & Billing

Sender identity, organization settings, credit rates, and limits.

Surveys are also fully available through BuildBetter MCP, including creating a complete survey in one operation, sending a preview, activating, and retrieving responses with their follow-up answer pairs.