Write them the way a buyer asks
People do not type keywords into an assistant. They write a sentence or two and put their situation in it. A prompt worth tracking looks like that. Compare:
email marketing software
I run a small online shop with a few thousand subscribers and send one newsletter a week. Which email marketing platform should I use?
The first is a search query. The second is what a buyer asks, and the context in it is what makes an assistant choose and recommend. A few rules follow from that.
- Use full sentences. Write the question as you would say it to a knowledgeable colleague.
- Say who is asking. Company size, role, budget, the tools already in place. One or two details are enough.
- Ask one thing per prompt. Two questions in one prompt give an answer you cannot attribute to either.
- Leave your brand out of most of them. A prompt that names you shows how you are described. It cannot show whether you are found. Keep a few branded prompts on purpose, such as “Is Brightloop a good choice for a small online shop?” or “Brightloop or Mailora for a weekly newsletter?”, and let the rest be unbranded. Teddit marks a prompt that names your brand with “Names your brand”, so you read its numbers for what they are.
The best source of wording is your own customers: sales calls, support tickets, the search box on your site, the questions people ask in demos. If you already keep a list of search queries, you can bring it in with a category and an intent for each row. See Importing. The list itself has to come from you. Teddit measures the prompts you give it and does not pick them for you.
Cover your categories and your intents
A list written in one sitting tends to circle one topic. Two labels on every prompt keep it balanced. A category is a segment of your business: a product line, a use case or an audience. A prompt can sit in several. The made-up email platform Brightloop might use Newsletters, Shop automation, Deliverability and Switching platforms.
An intent is what the person is after. Teddit has four.
| Intent | The person wants to | Example for Brightloop |
|---|---|---|
| Informational | Understand something | How do I keep my newsletter out of the spam folder? |
| Commercial | Compare options | Which email marketing platforms suit a small online shop? |
| Transactional | Act now | Which email platform can I start on for free today and move my subscriber list into? |
| Navigational | Reach a known brand | Where do I find Brightloop’s guide to importing a subscriber list? |
Picture a grid of categories against intents and check which cells are empty. You do not need to fill every one. You do need to know which ones you left out. The intents also behave differently. A commercial question asks for a recommendation, so its answers name brands. An informational question asks for an explanation, so its answers cite pages and may name no brand at all. If you care about both being named and being linked, you need both kinds.
How many: 15 to 30 is a workable start
There is no correct number. There is a number you will read. 15 to 30 prompts is usually enough to cover three or four categories across the intents, and few enough that someone opens the answers every week.
The arithmetic is worth doing once. Every prompt is asked of every assistant you scan with. Say you track 20 prompts on six assistants. One scan is 120 answers. On a weekly schedule that is roughly 520 answers a month, each one paid for from your balance and each one something to read when it changes. Doubling the list doubles both.
Start small. Add prompts when you notice a category or a kind of buyer the list does not cover, not because the list looks short.
Keep them stable over time
A prompt earns its value over weeks. The first scan tells you where you stand. Every later scan tells you what changed, and that only works if the question stayed the same. Assistants are sensitive to wording, so an edited prompt is a new question as far as the answers are concerned.
When you edit a prompt in Teddit, the answers already collected keep their place in its history, and later scans ask the new text. The row then holds answers to two different questions. So fix typos in the first days and then leave the text alone. If you want to ask something different, add a new prompt next to the old one.
Review the whole list on a slow rhythm, once a quarter for example, and resist rewording prompts just because last week’s answer was disappointing.
Pause rather than delete
Some prompts stop being useful. A campaign ends, a product line is retired, a question turns out to be one nobody asks. A prompt can be paused instead of removed, and pausing is nearly always the better way to retire one.
- Paused: the prompt is left out of scans and costs nothing. Its answers and its history stay. You can switch it back on later and pick up the same row.
- Deleted: the prompt is gone, and the answers collected for it go with it.
Delete duplicates and mistakes. Pause everything else. A seasonal prompt paused in January is ready again in October with last year’s history still attached.
Use categories to scan one segment cheaply
Categories are also a way to spend less. A scan can cover every active prompt or a single category. When something changes in one part of your business, you can check that part without paying for the rest.
Say Brightloop publishes a new guide to deliverability on a Tuesday. The next full scan is days away. A scan of the Deliverability category alone asks only those prompts and shows whether the assistants have picked the page up, at a fraction of the cost of the full list.
To add your first prompts and run a scan, follow the quick start.