Design a prompt set worth monitoring
A prompt set is the questionnaire your monitoring answers. Built badly, you get confident numbers about questions nobody asks. Built well, it’s the foundation every metric sits on.
Source the prompts from reality
- Sales calls and support tickets — the actual phrasing buyers use, not marketing’s version
- People Also Ask — mine it at scale; PAA questions are literally generated from search behavior
- Fan-out queries — run seed prompts once and read
searchQueries[]; the engine’s own reformulations show how the intent decomposes - Autocomplete and forums — “is X”, “X vs”, “best X for” patterns from Google suggest and Reddit titles
Cluster by intent, not keyword
Group prompts by what the asker wants: category (“best X for Y”), comparison (“X vs Z”, “alternatives to X”), problem (“how to solve P”), branded (“is
How many
- Minimum useful: ~30 prompts across your core clusters, one market, weekly — enough to see direction.
- Real program: 50–200 prompts, top markets, per engine. The credit cost stays modest — estimator on the pricing page.
- Depth beats breadth: 40 well-chosen prompts run weekly outperform 500 prompts run once.
Phrasing rules
Fix the exact prompt text — answers vary with wording, and “best CRM” vs “what’s the best CRM” are different samples. Write prompts as a buyer types them, not as keyword strings. Keep a few paraphrases per intent if you want a variance estimate.
Refresh, don’t churn
Review quarterly: add prompts for new competitors and new product lines, retire dead ones — but keep the core set stable so trends stay comparable. Changing the set changes the metric.
Then it’s mechanics: batch the set through the async API, store every response, and let the share-of-voice metrics fall out of the data.