Practical Experiments in AI Search Visibility
Choosing AI visibility prompts starts with understanding the questions customers ask as they move from identifying a problem towards choosing a product or provider. These guides show how different businesses can map that journey and turn real customer needs into practical AI visibility test prompts
When businesses think about being discovered online, the traditional question has often been: “Which keywords do we need to rank for?” But AI-driven search introduces a different challenge. Customers are increasingly asking AI systems to help them make decisions: The question for businesses is therefore not only: “Are we visible for a search term?” It … Read more
In our previous article, we explored a simple but important idea: AI visibility starts with customer needs, not prompts. Before a business thinks about which AI searches to test, which keywords to monitor or which content to create, it should first understand the situations that cause customers to look for help. The prompt is not … Read more
When businesses begin exploring AI visibility, the natural temptation is to start with AI itself. They ask: These are important questions. Testing and measurement matter. But they may not be the right starting point. Before thinking about prompts, businesses should ask a more fundamental question: Why would someone need us in the first place? Every … Read more
Choosing which prompts to test is one of the most important parts of AI visibility testing. It is also one of the easiest parts to overcomplicate. You could generate 100 questions about your business. You could collect keywords, variations and long-tail searches. You could ask an AI tool to suggest dozens more. But a long … Read more
Choosing which prompts to monitor is one of the most important parts of AI visibility testing. It is also easy to overcomplicate. You could ask an AI tool to generate 100 questions about your business. You could collect phrases from search tools. You could create dozens of slight variations of the same query. But none … Read more
One of the hardest questions in AI visibility testing comes before you run a single test: Which prompts should you actually monitor? It is easy to type a few obvious questions into ChatGPT, Google AI Mode or another AI search platform and start recording which businesses appear. But a handful of obvious prompts may tell … Read more
While looking more closely at NOLA Marketing after our recent discussion of the NOLA/OtterlyAI case study, I came across an article by Emily Matthews that connected particularly strongly with several things we have been observing in our own AI visibility tests. The article is What Is a Query Fan-Out in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?. Emily … Read more
Businesses cannot currently obtain a reliable list of every long conversational question people ask in Google AI Mode. Fortunately, they may not need one. AI visibility can be tested around commercially important customer needs rather than exact long-tail queries. The aim is not to predict every sentence a potential customer might type. It is to … Read more
If a business tracks one carefully chosen AI search prompt, how much does that result tell us about its visibility for the wider customer need? I tested this by taking one commercially specific accountancy scenario and expressing it five different ways. The customer did not change. The location did not change. The services required did … Read more
Choosing the right searches is one of the most important parts of AI visibility testing. But there is a difference between creating a long list of prompts and creating a query set that genuinely represents potential customers. You could test: That gives you four prompts. But they are essentially variations of the same broad customer … Read more