Which AI prompts should you track? A practical guide

For most teams, the answer to “which prompts should I track?” is this: track a representative sample of branded, unbranded, and competitor prompts across buyer stages, personas, and priority markets. Don’t fall into the trap of tracking everything.

Remember: buyers don’t query answer engines the way they query Google. A prompt often reads like a brief. Prompts often include details like team size, budget, location, and follow-up questions that all reshape the answer. Faced with that variation, marketers either track everything and drown in noise or fall back on branded queries that inflate visibility metrics.

This guide aims to help marketers build an effective prompt tracking set. The guide explains choosing and balancing prompts as well as scoring, maintaining, and turning visibility and citation findings into content decisions.

Table of Contents

• Which prompts should I track to reflect real buyer intent?
• Which prompts should I track for awareness vs. decision?
• Which prompts should I track first, and how many should I start with?
• Which prompts should I track based on CRM-informed business context?
• Which prompt tracking engines, locations, and cadence should I use?
• Which prompts should I track to prove business impact?
• Which prompts should I track for ongoing reporting and page-level fixes?
• How to Tell Which Prompts Are Working
• How do I maintain my prompt set quarterly?
• How to Configure Prompt Tracking In HubSpot AEO
• Frequently Asked Questions About Prompt Tracking.
• Track fewer prompts, but track smarter.

Which prompts should I track to reflect real buyer intent?

According to Responsive research, 56% of tech buyers are turning to generative AI to build vendor shortlists. Answer engines increasingly drive which brands buyers consider before they ever visit a website.

Tracking prompts shows marketers whether their brand appears where buyers are asking, how it’s described, and which competitors and sources are winning those answers instead.

How do branded, unbranded, and competitor prompts work?

Think about prompts in three broad categories: branded, unbranded, and competitor.

Branded Prompts

Branded prompts include the company or product name, such as “What is [Brand]?” or “Does [Brand] integrate with Salesforce?”

Important note: In the same way that a brand will rank for its branded keyword in traditional SEO, answer engines should always mention the brand here, so presence isn’t the metric. Branded prompts protect brand accuracy in AI answers. For branded prompts, the focus is sentiment and accuracy.

Unbranded Prompts

Unbranded prompts describe a problem or category without naming any company, such as “best project management software for agencies” or “how to reduce client onboarding time.” Unbranded solution-seeking prompts measure discovery-stage visibility. Unbranded prompts usually reveal the biggest gaps and should make up the largest share of a prompt set.

In my experience, unbranded prompts deserve the same priority as unbranded keywords in traditional SEO. Search teams often judge search performance by branded demand, but search teams and stakeholders must understand that nonbranded search plays a critical role in performance as well.

Increasing brand visibility is mostly the job of PR, brand marketing, and wider visibility efforts. Search supports that work, but a search team’s core role is to reach buyers who are still discovering their options and don’t yet know which brands to consider. In AI search, unbranded prompts are where that discovery happens. Unbranded prompts are the clearest measure of whether answer engine optimization (AEO) is reaching new buyers, tying visibility as directly as possible to a search team’s efforts.

Competitor Prompts

Competitor prompts reveal where rivals appear during evaluation. Competitor prompts name one or more rivals, such as “Is [Competitor] good for remote teams?” or “alternatives to [Competitor].” Answers to these prompts show which brands answer engines consider as the category’s default options, and whether the brand appears as a credible alternative.

Pro Tip: If possible, track prompts for three to five direct competitors. Keep the focus on competitors who have solid marketing strategies and perform well online.

Ideally, marketers will track prompts that fall under all three categories of branded, unbranded, and competitor.

Branded

What is [Brand]?

What does [Brand] do for agencies?

[Brand] vs. [Competitor]

[Brand] pricing and plans

Unbranded

How do agencies keep client projects on track?

What types of project management software exist?

Best project management tools for agencies

Most affordable project management tool with time tracking

Competitor

What is [Competitor] used for?

Is [Competitor] good for remote teams?

Alternatives to [Competitor]

[Competitor] pricing vs. alternatives

Using dedicated tools for prompt tracking, instead of manual checks, makes spotting trends more manageable for marketers. HubSpot’s AEO tool gives marketers one place to monitor prompts and track brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Teams can compare how often competitors appear on the same prompts, review which sources answer engines cite, and turn findings into clear, prioritized recommendations.

For Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers, AEO is included and uses CRM data to suggest prompts to track, rather than relying on generic industry templates. HubSpot’s AEO tool is also available standalone for $50/month (25 prompts included).

How should I balance my prompt mix?

A balanced prompt mix can look slightly different for different businesses. One thing that stays the same is that a balanced prompt mix puts most tracking effort where visibility is uncertain, and buyers are still deciding. Search marketers can make the biggest difference in this uncertain visibility phase through prompt balancing.

Branded search should always show the brand anyway. Conversions on branded search should always be strong, as this is the type of search people make when they’ve made their decision.

Paid search data from my boutique search marketing agency, forank, shows the relationship between branded search and conversions clearly. My business partner, Leigh Buttrey, runs paid advertising for a leading London catering company, and I manage the company’s SEO and AEO efforts. Paid campaigns show exactly which searches drive conversions and provide insight into user behavior where keywords are concerned. This is data that SEO teams don’t have, because Google doesn’t provide conversion data for organic search. Because it’s hard to know which keywords actually drive conversions, SEO can borrow from paid campaign data. A keyword that performs well for paid search will, in theory, perform well for organic SEO.

This year, our catering company’s branded campaign generated 223 conversions at a 4.20% conversion rate. Branded search accounts for around 46% of all conversions from the company’s search campaigns. The data tells a story about how customers come back and search for the business by name once they’re ready to act. We see this pattern across many accounts. Vendor decisions are often made during the research phase, and the branded search is just the last step. That’s why visibility in unbranded, research-stage prompts matters most.

Start with a type ratio.

Start with a ratio of queries split between unbranded, competitor, and branded. Get a feel for the data and whether it’s suitable for the marketing campaigns running.

Unbranded

50–60%

Reveals the biggest visibility gaps and discovery opportunities

Competitor

20–30%

Shows who answer engines treat as the default options

Branded

10–20%

Checks accuracy; prioritize brand-vs.-competitor comparisons

Spread prompts across personas and products.

The unbranded, competitor, and branded categories are solid but broad. Next, make prompt tracking more useful by tracking prompts by persona or ideal client profile (ICP). Tracking by persona or ICP helps marketers ensure they’re reaching every major decision-maker, which is especially important in complex B2B settings. For example, one marketing team may need stakeholder buy-in from a Chief Finance Officer (CFO), an Operations Lead, and the end user.

A CFO might ask for “software that shortens month-end close,” while an Operations Lead asks how to “automate invoice approvals.” These audiences probably want the same product, and putting your company’s product in front of both audiences increases the chances of your brand appearing in boardrooms when vendor decisions are being made. Aim to cover each priority persona.

Pro tip: Review the prompt mix regularly. Complete the first review after the first month. If branded prompts consistently return accurate, positive answers, consider moving those slots to unbranded or competitor prompts where there’s more to learn.

Which prompts should I track for awareness vs. decision?

Awareness prompts are broad and problem-focused. The buyer is trying to understand a challenge. They’re not choosing a vendor. Answer engines tend to explain concepts and cite educational content, often without naming brands. Here’s an example of Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) for an awareness query:

Decision prompts are narrow and packed with constraints such as budget, integrations, team size, or contract terms. Answers usually name a few vendors, so these searches influence the buyer’s shortlist. Here’s an example of Google AIO for a decision query:

Any of the three tools mentioned in the AIO has a good chance of a website click or making the buyer shortlist.

Tracking prompts by buyer journey connects visibility to how buyers actually move toward a purchase. Buyer-journey prompt sets cover awareness, consideration, evaluation, and decision intent.

Awareness

How do agencies stop client projects running over budget?

Whether brand content is cited as a source

Consideration

What types of project management software work best for agencies?

Whether the brand is named in the category

Evaluation

Best project management tools for agencies with time tracking

Brand position and description vs. competitors

Decision

Most affordable agency project management tool that integrates with QuickBooks

Shortlist inclusion and accuracy of pricing and features

Most of the prompt set belongs in the consideration and evaluation stages, where shortlists form. Awareness prompts are worth a smaller share to check whether answer engines use the brand’s content as a source, even when they don’t name the brand.

How should I represent follow-up intent in a prompt set?

According to 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, B2B buyers evaluated an average of 5.1 vendors, up from 4.5 the year before. In previous years, each additional vendor on a shortlist added about two months to the buying cycle. This time, cycles actually shortened by just over a month. Buyers are comparing more options in less time, so every stage of research carries more comparison questions, and each one is a chance for a brand to make or miss the shortlist.

After an initial answer, buyers using answer engines will narrow down with follow-ups like:

• “Which is cheapest?”
• “Does it integrate with Slack?”

A brand that doesn’t cover the details can appear in the first answer and disappear once the buyer adds constraints.

Since tracking tools ‌run each prompt as a standalone question, marketers must write follow-ups as complete prompts with context. The same principles behind effective ChatGPT prompts, including clear context, a specific role, and defined constraints, apply to writing prompts worth tracking.

For example, instead of tracking “Which is cheapest?” track “What’s the most affordable project management tool for agencies with built-in time tracking?” Add standalone follow-ups that reflect the most common next questions.

• Pricing: “Which agency project management tools cost less than $15 per user per month?”
• Integrations: “Which project management tools for agencies integrate with HubSpot and QuickBooks?”
• Alternatives: “What are the best alternatives to [Competitor] for small agencies?”

Pro tip: The best follow-up prompts come from questions sales teams hear repeatedly in discovery calls and demos, because those reflect the real objections buyers have before they commit.

If your prompt tracking tool allows, as HubSpot AEO does, keep each root prompt and its follow-ups in the same tracking group. Reporting then shows exactly where in the conversation the brand drops out. This can point to the specific content gap to fix, such as missing pricing information or undocumented integrations.

Which prompts should I track first, and how many should I start with?

Search marketing efforts have the same goal as other teams in the company: they need to make money for the business. Therefore, the prompts to start tracking first should be tied to revenue.

Identify prompts that generate revenue.

Start by identifying prompts that drive clicks and revenue. I like to reverse-engineer which landing pages are being clicked. Landing pages receiving clicks from AEO are clearly working for the business. Landing pages that also convert are clearly working. Sometimes, landing pages have a clear angle, like a specific feature or audience. It’s not an exact science, but marketing should be able to make some educated guesses on the type of prompts that are leading to the landing page’s visibility.

Speak to sales.

Sales and customer service teams are a valuable source. The questions that sales teams hear repeatedly in discovery calls and demos, such as “How long does implementation take?”, “Will it work with our existing systems?”, or “What happens to our data if we switch?” reflect the real concerns buyers need resolved before they commit. Buyers increasingly ask answer engines these same questions before they ever speak to a sales rep, so turning recurring objections into tracked prompts shows whether AI answers address those concerns, and whether they point buyers toward the brand or a competitor. Structured voice-of-the-customer methodologies, such as reviewing call recordings or tagging common objections in support tickets, make it easier to spot which questions come up most often.

Start with 25 to 50 prompts.

Prompts are so varied and subjective that it’s easy to become overwhelmed tracking many of them. Instead, start smaller, then build the prompts over time.

A starting set of 25 to 50 prompts is enough to spot patterns without creating noise. HubSpot AEO’s free trial covers 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, a useful benchmark for a first set. Expand once the first month of data shows which topics need deeper coverage.

Pro tip: Before finalizing a first set, run a quick baseline. HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader is a one-time diagnostic that scores how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity characterize a brand across five dimensions: sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position. Marketers can run it for their own brand, then for each key competitor using the same location and category, to compare how sentiment and share of voice differ across the market. Weak scores point to where tracking should start. Low presence quality suggests unbranded category prompts, while weak sentiment suggests branded prompts around the issues driving it.

Here’s an example of what AI Search Grader says about HubSpot’s opportunities:

AI Search Grader specifically shows “Growth Areas.” These areas could inform decisions about marketing campaigns and prompts to target. Across two core answer engine platforms (OpenAI and Perplexity), enhanced/advanced analytics are listed as a growth opportunity, and in Gemini, AI and automation capabilities are listed. There’s some crossover between these features, so teams could create content that addresses these areas and therefore increase visibility. Tracking prompts related to these topics would then make sense.

How do query fan-out and clustering help avoid tracking noise?

Query fan-out is the process answer engines use to break a single prompt into multiple related searches behind the scenes. Google has described AI Mode and AIO working this way: “While responses are being generated, our advanced models identify more supporting web pages, allowing us to display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links associated with the response than with a classic web search, enabling new opportunities for exploration."

A prompt like “best project management tool for a small agency with client billing” might fan out into separate searches on agency project management tools, billing features, pricing, and reviews. The engine then combines what it finds into one answer.

Fan-out explains why tracking every phrasing of a question adds little value. Ten different wordings of the same question often trigger overlapping sub-queries and pull from many of the same sources. Clustering groups those variations by underlying intent, so one or two representative prompts can stand in for the whole cluster.

For example, “best project management tool for agencies” and “top agency project management software” belong in the same cluster. Clustering is best practice for three reasons.

• More stable signals: AI answers vary from run to run, even for identical prompts. Reporting at the cluster level smooths out that variation and shows real trends.
• Better use of tracking slots: Removing near-duplicate phrasings frees up space for prompts that cover new intents, personas, or competitors.
• Clearer content decisions: Each cluster usually maps to one topic or page, so a visibility gap points to a specific piece of content to create or improve.

Which prompts should I track based on CRM-informed business context?

CRM data shows who buys, why they buy, and who the business loses deals to, making it one of the most reliable sources for prompt selection. Yet CRM data is often overlooked because most standalone AEO tools have no connection to a company’s customer data. Without the link between AEO tool and CRM data, teams are effectively guessing at which prompts matter. The risk is that marketers end up falling back on generic category questions that may not reflect their real buyers.

For teams working out how to use CRM data to find prompts to track, the goal is to turn real customer patterns into prompts. Here’s how to discover the prompts your marketing team should track based on data within the CRM.

1. Start with closed-won deals.

Look for patterns in recent closed-won deals such as the industries, company sizes, regions, and use cases that appear most often. Each pattern becomes a set of unbranded prompts written from that buyer’s perspective. If mid-sized healthcare companies make up a large share of new revenue, prompts like “best patient scheduling software for multi-location clinics” deserve a place in the set.

2. Mine closed-lost reasons and competitors.

Lost deals show where the brand is losing ground. Competitors named in closed-lost records belong in the competitor prompt set, and recurring loss reasons such as price, missing integrations, or ease of use point to evaluation prompts worth tracking.

3. Weight toward high-value segments.

Not every segment deserves equal coverage. Give more prompts to segments with the highest deal value, shortest sales cycles, or strongest retention, and fewer to segments that generate leads but rarely convert.

Industry with growing closed-won deals

“Best [category] software for [industry]”

Competitor frequently named in lost deals

“Alternatives to [Competitor] for [use case]”

Recurring loss reason (e.g., integrations)

“Which [category] tools integrate with [system]?”

High-retention company size

“[Category] tool for companies with [size] employees”

Pro tip: Revisit CRM-based prompts whenever the business enters a new market, launches a product, or sees a shift in who’s buying. The prompt set should follow the customer base.

HubSpot’s AEO tool connects to CRM data from day one for Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers. Prompt suggestions are based on that data, not generic industry templates, so marketers start with prompts tailored to their business and can add their own. As CRM data grows, suggestions stay aligned with how the customer base is changing.

How do I translate keywords and FAQs into prompts?

Keywords and FAQs that already perform in traditional search are one of the fastest ways to build a prompt set, because they show proven demand and topics where the brand already has authority. The job is to turn short, keyword-style searches into the longer, context-rich questions buyers ask answer engines.

Start with long-tail and question queries in Google Search Console.

Google Search Console shows which queries already drive impressions and clicks. The most useful queries for prompt tracking are long-tail queries, which often reveal a problem or hint at who is searching, and question-style queries, which closely resemble how people phrase prompts. Exporting Google Search Console (GSC) data and sorting queries by word count is a quick way to surface them.

Add the context a buyer would include.

A keyword becomes a useful prompt when it includes details a real buyer would add, such as role, company size, constraint, or goal. Use CRM data to build the audience and understand the details.

agency project management software

What’s the best project management software for a 20-person creative agency that bills clients hourly?

CRM for small business

Which CRM is easiest to set up for a small business with no dedicated sales ops person?

how to reduce churn

How can a B2B SaaS company reduce churn in the first 90 days after onboarding?

Keep the core topic of the keyword intact, so prompt results can still be compared with organic performance for the same topic.

Turn FAQs into full questions.

FAQs are already written as questions, which makes them easy to convert. Strong sources include on-site FAQ sections, People Also Ask results, support tickets, and pre-sales questions. Add buyer context to generic FAQs, and prioritize the questions tied to purchase decisions, such as pricing, integrations, and implementation, over purely definitional ones.

Map topic clusters to prompt clusters.

Teams that already organize content into topic clusters have a ready-made structure for prompts. Each pillar topic can become a prompt cluster, with the subtopics informing the individual prompts. This keeps prompt reporting aligned with content strategy, so a visibility gap in a cluster points straight to the pillar or supporting pages that need work.

Marketing Hub’s SEO tools make topic and prompt clustering easier for HubSpot users. They surface prioritized recommendations for optimizing site pages, suggest topics that build search authority, and integrate with Google Search Console so teams can see how queries perform, including impressions and click-through rate. That query and cluster data is a practical starting point for translating proven keywords into conversational prompts.

Which prompt tracking engines, locations, and cadence should I use?

The right setup depends on the individual business because there are many variables, such as where buyers research, which markets drive revenue, and how much variation the team can manage in analysis and reporting.

Choose engines based on goals.

According to HubSpot’s 2026 State of AEO Report, consumers’ preferred platforms are ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. These two platforms are a good place to start; however, every business should try to find out where their specific audiences are searching. For most businesses, there are three to four core platforms, including:

• ChatGPT
• AI Mode and AI Overviews
• Perplexity

If teams want to discover exactly which platforms are driving traffic to a website, set up a report on Data Studio (formerly called Looker Studio) that pulls information from Google Analytics showing the source and the landing page visit.

Focus on priority markets.