Prompt tracking: build the prompt set that measures your category
TL;DR
Your prompt set is your new keyword portfolio: the fixed list of buyer questions you measure every AI engine against. Build it from real buyer language, split it by market and language, size it 25–100 per pair, and never silently edit it — continuity is what makes the trend real.
What makes a good tracked prompt
- Buyer-phrased. “What’s the best running shoe for beginners?” — not “running shoes UAE”. Assistants get questions, so track questions.
- Commercially meaningful. Every prompt should map to revenue: category shortlists, comparisons, “worth it?” validations, local intent.
- Answerable with brands. A prompt whose natural answer names no companies measures nothing about your visibility.
- Stable. You’ll compare answers across months; a churning set has no baseline.
How to build the set (half a day, once)
- Harvest questions from sales calls, support tickets, search console queries, and the “People also ask” boxes on your money keywords.
- Cluster by intent: discovery (“best X in Dubai”), comparison (“X vs Y”), validation (“is X worth it”), and problem prompts (“how do I fix…”), which seed content ideas even when they name no brands yet.
- Localize properly. Each market-language pair gets its own set — Arabic prompts written natively, not translated; the reasoning is laid out in the Arabic AI search guide.
- Version the set. When you add or retire prompts, date the change — otherwise every share-of-voice movement is ambiguous.
Running and reading the tracker
Cadence beats volume
Weekly runs of a stable set beat daily runs of a churning one. The metrics you extract per answer — mention, rank, sentiment — are covered in the measurement framework.
Let the answers name your competitors
Score every brand the engines mention, and new entrants surface themselves the week they start winning — that workflow is competitor analysis in AI search.
Turn losses into briefs
A prompt cluster where you’re absent is a content brief with a measurement attached: publish against it, wait a cycle, re-read the number.
Tooling
Pilot by hand with ten prompts to feel the data. To run it for real — scheduled, multi-engine, multi-market, with alerting — that’s the core of Search Genie’s tracking loop, from 50 tracked prompts on Starter to 600 on Enterprise, checked daily on Growth and above.
Frequently asked questions
What is prompt tracking?+
Prompt tracking is monitoring a fixed set of real buyer questions against AI engines on a schedule, and recording which brands each answer mentions, in what order, with what sentiment. It's the AI-era equivalent of rank tracking a keyword portfolio.
How is a prompt set different from a keyword list?+
Keywords are fragments people typed into a search box; prompts are full questions people ask an assistant, phrased conversationally and per language. One keyword often expands into several distinct prompts with different intents — and different winning brands.
How many prompts do I need per market?+
25 to 100 tracked prompts per market-language pair covers most categories: enough that one strange answer can't swing your share of voice, small enough to keep runs affordable. Start at 25 core buying questions and grow where the data shows contested ground.
Find out what AI says about your brand
Free, human-reviewed audit across AI answers and search.