Prompt
Also called: AI prompt, AI query
Definition
A prompt is the text a user sends to a generative AI: a question, an instruction, a request for a comparison. It can be short, like “best health insurance for the self-employed”, or long, with a whole context.
In AI visibility, the word mostly refers to questions that represent a market, put to the engines at regular intervals to see which brands come up. Choosing them well is half the work: prompts that are too generic or too far from your customers give a false measurement.
Example
For an online accounting firm, “which accountant for a small LLC?”, “how much do year-end accounts cost?” and “Dougs or Keobiz?” are three prompts that cover three different moments of the decision.
What it means for your AI visibility
Your AI visibility only makes sense on prompts that look like your customers' questions. Start with about twenty well-chosen questions, by audience and by competitor, rather than hundreds picked at random.
Free toolPrompt calculatorFind out how many questions to track for your brand, and get the list.Related terms
- Prompt trackingPrompt tracking means asking AI the same questions at regular intervals to follow how a brand's visibility changes.
- Conversational searchConversational search replaces keywords with full questions, put to an AI in natural language, with follow-ups.
- AI visibilityAI visibility measures how often, in what position and in what way a brand appears in the answers of generative AI.
- LLMAn LLM is an AI model trained on huge volumes of text to understand and produce language. It is the engine behind ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
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