What is prompt tracking in AEO, and which prompts to track?
In short
Prompt tracking is asking AI assistants the same set of questions on a schedule, several times each, and recording who they name and cite. The questions should be the ones your buyers ask, in their words, and they shouldn't change week to week, or the history stops being comparable.
Keats, from PressRoom. Updated Read as markdown
"Prompt" is the tools' word for a question you track. Prompt tracking is the measurement half of AEO: a fixed list of questions, asked of each assistant several times a week, with the answers stored so you can count who was named and which pages were cited.
Choosing the questions
The best sources, roughly in order of how much they tell you about buying:
- What people search before they buy: your ad search terms that convert, if you run ads.
- What people search in general: keyword data, filtered to buying and preparing intent.
- Where your site already ranks: Search Console queries.
- How the assistants research it: the fan-out searches they run.
- How real people phrase it: forums and sales calls.
Be wary of keyword lists full of long, oddly specific phrasings. Some show hundreds of searches a month for questions like "most reliable AI search optimization tool for data accuracy", and many of those look like other tools' tracked prompts run through Google rather than people.
Keeping it honest
Reword a question and it's a new question: retire the old one, so its history doesn't mix with the new wording. Keep 20 to 30 per thing you sell, at least ten of them buying questions. Ask each several times per assistant per week, because a single ask tells you little (see noise band).
Sources
- Keats: US search volume and difficulty for 40 AEO terms (CSV, from Ahrefs), read November 12, 2026