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Brands and prompts

Choosing prompts

A prompt is a question your buyers might ask an AI assistant. Your prompts are your sample: the numbers describe the prompts you track, not every question people ask. They’re worth some thought.

What makes a good prompt

  • Written the way people ask. “What’s the best project tool for a small team?” beats “project tool best”.
  • About the problem, not your name. Prompts that include your brand nearly always mention you, which flatters your numbers.
  • Different from each other. Near-duplicates spend answers without teaching you anything. Ocita flags them.
  • Specific to where buyers are. If the brand is local, set a city in its run location and ask the way locals would.

Topics

Every prompt has a topic, such as “Pricing” or “Alternatives”, so you can filter Prompts and see which themes you win or lose. A new prompt without one goes under “General”. Setup suggests prompts across up to 10 topics.

Funnel stages

Each prompt sits in one stage:

  • Awareness: the buyer is learning about the problem. “How do small businesses run payroll?”
  • Consideration: they’re comparing options. “Best payroll software for a 20-person company”
  • Decision: they’re close to choosing. “Is Payloft worth it for contractors?”

Prompts groups your list by stage, so you can see whether you show up early in the journey or only at the end.

Branded and non-branded

A prompt is Branded when it names your brand by any of its aliases. Ocita marks this for you. A few branded prompts tell you how engines describe you. Too many inflate visibility, so Ocita warns when more than 30% of a brand’s prompts are branded. Setup lets you cap the branded share at 10%, 20% or 30%.

How many to track

Each brand can have up to 50 active prompts. Around 25 is a good start. A metric needs at least 20 sampled prompts before it can be marked Stable, and more prompts give narrower ranges.

Every active prompt uses answers each week: with all four engines at 5 repeats, that’s 20 answers a week. 50 prompts, the most a brand can have, come to about 4,350 a month, the allowance included with each brand on Standard. See Usage and answer budgets.

Changing prompts over time

Editing a prompt’s text changes what it measures, so treat it as a new question. To keep a clean trend, pause the old prompt and add a new one. Paused prompts keep their history. See Adding and editing prompts.

Related

Adding and editing prompts Add prompts one at a time, by pasting, from a CSV or from suggestions; edit, pause, delete and retopic them in bulk; and read each prompt's results. Prompt templates Reuse a prompt set across brands with Ocita templates: the starter sets, placeholders, saving a brand's prompts as a template, editing and applying. How ranges work Why Ocita shows a range beside every number, what a 90% range means, how it's calculated, and how to make yours narrower.
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