How to find the prompts your buyers actually ask AI

Your AI visibility number is only as meaningful as the questions behind it. Track the wrong prompts and you'll either scare yourself with irrelevant zeros or flatter yourself with softballs. This is the method we use to build a prompt set that actually predicts revenue.

The one rule: buyer intent, not brand vanity

A useful prompt is one a real buyer types before they know you exist. That means:

• Never include your own brand name. "Is Acme any good?" measures reputation, not discoverability. The money question is who gets named when you're not mentioned.
• Anchor on the job, not the category label. Buyers ask "how do I keep my remote team's projects on track without daily standups" more often than they ask for your industry's official category name.
• At most one competitor-comparison prompt. "X vs Y" questions are worth tracking once, but a set full of them measures your rivals' funnels, not yours.

The five shapes buyer questions take

Across categories, buyer questions to AI assistants land in a handful of shapes. Build your set to cover all five:

• Round-up: "What are the best [category] tools in 2026?"
• Situational: "Best [category] for a 5-person agency / for beginners / for enterprise compliance"
• Outcome: "How do I [achieve outcome] without [pain]?"
• Budget: "Cheapest [category] that's actually reliable" / "[category] pricing compared"
• Trust: "Which [category] do people actually recommend on Reddit?"

Ten to twenty well-chosen prompts covering these shapes beat a hundred generated filler questions.

Where to mine the real wording

The gap between what you'd guess and what buyers type is bigger than you think. Mine:

• Sales calls and demos: the first sentence of "so what made you look for something like this?"
• Support and onboarding tickets: the jobs people struggle to do are the jobs they asked AI about first.
• Paid-search query reports: your search-terms report is a corpus of real buyer language you already own.
• Community threads: how people phrase the problem on Reddit or in niche Slack/Discord groups, in their words.

Keep the set stable

Resist the urge to rewrite prompts every week. Visibility moves are only measurable against a fixed question set. Change the questions and you've reset your baseline. Add new prompts alongside old ones; retire a prompt only when the job it represents genuinely stopped mattering.

Sanity-check the set

Before committing, run each prompt manually once. A good prompt produces an answer that names brands (yours or not). If the assistant answers with generic advice and no products, the wording is too abstract. Sharpen it toward a purchase decision.

Geofound generates a starter set automatically by reading your website and inferring the jobs buyers hire you for, then runs them daily across six core AI engines, with Grok and Gemini as add-ons. See what it picks for your site with the free scan, or read how to win the answers you're losing.