How Do I Choose and Set Up Prompts for the Best Results?

The prompts you track are the foundation of everything in Chatbeat. Your Brand Score, position data, Share of Voice, and competitive insights all come from the questions you choose to monitor. Getting this list right isn't just a setup task, it's a strategic decision that shapes the quality of every insight you'll get afterward.

Not every prompt should do the same job. Some should ask directly about your brand or product, some should sit higher up the funnel and ask about the category in general, and some should mention your brand by name to see how AI models describe you specifically. A prompt list built entirely from one type gives you a narrow, one-dimensional view of your visibility.

Grouping your prompts by type, for example separating comparison questions from general recommendations, also makes it much easier to review your list and spot gaps later on.

The language you prompt in matters just as much as the wording itself. If your brand operates globally, don't assume one project covers everything. Different markets often need their own projects, since the same question can surface entirely different competitors depending on the country and language it's asked in.

This also applies in reverse. If your brand operates in a single market only, for example the US, it's worth setting that country when configuring your project, even if it feels unnecessary. This isn't about adding the country name into the prompt itself, it's about the location Chatbeat queries AI models from. Setting a country means Chatbeat asks the models from an IP based in that market, the same way a real customer there would, which can significantly change which brands show up in the answer.

That said, geolocation is a signal, not a strict filter, so an AI model can still lean toward its own regional bias regardless of the IP a question comes from. Because of that, it's often worth adding the location directly into the prompt wording as well, for example asking "What are the best social listening tools in the US?" rather than relying on IP alone.

Every prompt comes with an estimated Search Volume, a helpful signal for prioritizing your list. But don't treat it as a reason to discard a prompt outright. A question with low search volume can still be worth tracking if it's strategically important to your business, for example if it targets a specific use case or niche you want to own. Volume tells you how popular a question is, not whether it matters to you.

For more on how this number is calculated, see our article on Search Volume.

If you already have keyword research from traditional SEO work, don't start from scratch. Take a look at the non-branded phrases you already rank for in Google, meaning the ones that describe a product or need rather than your brand name, and use them as a starting point. Those phrases already reflect real, validated search intent.

Before turning them into prompts, trim out synonyms and near-duplicates. LLMs care about the intent behind a question far more than matching a customer's exact wording, so there's no need to track five slightly different versions of the same phrase.

Once you've narrowed the list down, add context to turn a bare keyword into an actual question. A Google keyword like "dress" says nothing about intent on its own, but as a prompt it becomes something like "Where can I buy a dress?", which is much closer to how someone would actually ask an AI model.

Chatbeat's Suggested Prompts are built the same way, surfacing questions tied to a specific keyword phrase and its estimated volume, so you can see exactly what search intent sits behind each suggestion.

Write your prompts the way a person would actually ask an AI model, as a question or a full sentence, rather than as a bare keyword phrase. AI models respond to phrases like "social listening tools" very differently than they respond to "What are the best social listening tools?". Full questions tend to produce more definitional, structured answers, which is exactly the kind of response that reveals how a model positions your brand.

You don't need to track every possible phrasing of the same prompt. Chatbeat's semantic matching means minor variations of a question are grouped together automatically, so there's no need to add "best social listening tool" and "what is the best social listening tool" as separate entries. What matters more is making sure the wording you do use matches the language actual consumers and potential customers use, not internal or industry-specific terminology you'd use to describe your own product.

Getting your prompt list right takes a bit of iteration. Review it regularly, swap out prompts that aren't generating useful insight, and keep an eye on Suggested Prompts for new ideas. If you need help building the right list for your brand, don't hesitate to contact us.