Prompts
The questions you are measured on. Prompts are grouped into topics, checked on every surface your plan covers, and read as a grid rather than a list.
A prompt is a question you want to be the answer to. It is not a keyword, it is the whole question, phrased the way a buyer would ask it, and your own name is never in it.
What you'll learn
- What makes a good prompt, and why your name stays out of it
- How topics group prompts, and why the grid matters more than the list
- Where prompts come from if you do not want to write them all yourself
Landscape, topic, answers
The Prompts lens descends like every other lens. The landscape is your topics. Open one and you get that topic: the prompts inside it, how each is doing, and on which surfaces. Descend again and you are reading the answers themselves.
The grid is the part people underuse. Prompts down the side, engines across the top, one reading per cell. A list tells you which prompts you are losing. The grid tells you where you are losing them, and a prompt losing on one engine is a completely different problem from a prompt losing on five.
What a good prompt looks like
Write the question, not the phrase:
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
| melbourne physio | Who is the best physio in Melbourne for a running injury? |
| cloud accounting software | What is the best cloud accounting software for a five-person firm? |
| commercial solar | Is commercial solar worth it for a warehouse in Queensland? |
Three rules that matter:
- Never name yourself. A prompt with your brand in it asks the engine to talk about you, which it will, and the result measures nothing. Branded prompts have their place for reputation monitoring, and they are classified separately for that reason.
- Match a real decision. The prompts worth tracking are the ones a buyer asks before choosing. See intent classification.
- Be specific enough to be answerable. "Best software" gets a generic answer that names nobody. Add the buyer, the constraint or the place.
Where prompts come from
- Write them. Add a prompt directly, assign it to a topic.
- Discovery. The platform proposes prompts from your site, your category and the answers it has already seen, and you accept the ones that match your buyers.
- From what you are losing. A contested prompt that a rival wins is often the best next prompt, and the Competitors lens surfaces those.
Start narrow. Fifteen prompts that map to real buying decisions beat two hundred that cover the category, because every prompt costs coverage on every surface every cycle. See coverage and credits.
How often a prompt is checked
Checking runs on a cadence set by your plan rather than on demand, across each surface your plan covers. That is why the assistant answers from stored answers with dates attached: it is reading what the monitoring already produced, not asking the engines while you wait.
Try this in Outercite
Ask the assistant "Which prompts am I losing, and who is taking them?", then open the grid to see whether the losses cluster on one surface.
Related
Add prompts
The step-by-step: writing them, grouping them into topics, and using discovery.
Your first prompts
How to choose the first fifteen.
Competitors
Who is being named on the prompts you are losing.
Last updated on
When a number is missing
Why the platform says not measured, excluded or unmeasurable instead of showing you a zero, and what each of those states means.
Competitors
Who gets named instead of you. The landscape ranks the rivals appearing in your answers, and each rival opens a head to head built from the answers themselves.