Prompt tracking
What is prompt tracking?
Prompt tracking is the practice of running a fixed set of questions (prompts) through one or more AI assistants on a regular schedule and recording what the answers say: whether your brand is mentioned, whether your site is cited, the position of the citation and which competitors appear. It is the AI-search equivalent of rank tracking.
The difference from rank tracking is variability. A Google ranking is fairly stable from one check to the next; an AI answer can change every time you ask. Prompt tracking therefore reports rates (mention rate, citation rate, average position) across many runs, not a single result.
Why prompt tracking matters for SEO
Without tracking, AI visibility is anecdote: someone asks ChatGPT once, sees or doesn’t see the brand, and draws a conclusion. A fixed prompt set, run consistently, shows trends you can act on and lets you judge whether a content or PR change made a difference.
It also shows differences between assistants. A brand can be named often by one model and rarely by another, which points to different sources or training data.
How to set up prompt tracking
- Write prompts the way customers ask, mostly unbranded, across problem, category and comparison questions.
- Group them by topic or product line so you can see where you are strong and weak.
- Pick the assistants that matter to your audience and run with web search on, to match what users see.
- Run on a fixed schedule and keep the prompt set stable. When you change prompts, compare only like with like.
- Exclude failed answers and prompts that contain your own brand name from your rates, or they will inflate them.
- Compare your mention rate with competitors’ to get your share of voice.
Prompt tracking FAQ
How many prompts should I track?
Enough to cover your main topics with several prompts each, often 20-100 to start. A few dozen well-chosen prompts run regularly tell you more than hundreds run once.
How often should I run prompt tracking?
Weekly or monthly is common. Answers vary run to run, so more runs give steadier rates.
Related SEO terms
AI visibility is how often and how prominently AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity mention your brand or cite your site.
Rank tracking is checking where your pages rank in search results for chosen keywords over time, by device and location, to measure SEO progress.
Share of voice is your share of the visibility in a market, such as the share of AI answers or search clicks that go to you versus competitors.
AI citations are the links an AI assistant shows as sources for its answer. Being cited means your page helped build the answer.
Brand mentions are references to your brand name on other websites or in AI answers, with or without a link to your site.