How to Define the Right AI Prompts for Your Brand

TL;DR: Picking the right AI prompts shouldn't be guesswork. Start with your business goals, organize prompts by how your team already works, and track only what you can act on. Then track at two levels. Brand-level prompts show where you stand while customers research. Location-level prompts show who wins when they're ready to choose.

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According to the Corporate Ink GEO and AI Visibility 2026 report, 88% of CMO and VP-level marketers are being asked about AI visibility by leadership or their board. But only 34% have a defined strategy to track it.

Part of the challenge has been that brand and local visibility were treated as two separate conversations, with two teams, two dashboards, and often two vendors. Nobody had the whole picture. That’s why Yext recently announced brand-level capabilities in Scout, expanding it beyond local to bring brand and local visibility together in one dashboard for a more holistic view of performance.

But now that you can see both in one place, the challenge is: what AI prompts do we track, anyway?

Most brands have been making it by guesswork — or by inheriting whatever prompts a vendor pre-loaded. But that often means that they end up looking at the wrong competitive set and missing key moments of customer intent.

Here's how to build a prompt set that leads to action.

Step 1: Start with business goals, not prompts

Before you write a single query, talk about where your brand wants to be in the next six months. The prompts you track should map directly to those goals. That's what earns buy-in across teams and makes the data worth acting on.

Say a restaurant chain's Q4 goal is bringing in more families. That points to prompts like "best family restaurants near me," "restaurants with kids menus in [city]," and "where to eat Thanksgiving dinner in [city]." Each one has an owner, content you can influence, and a trend line steady enough to follow through the quarter. A prompt set built from the goal tells you whether you're winning these high-intent family dining searches.

A prompt set built from guesswork might track "casual dining" and tell you nothing useful.

Think of it as narrowing an infinite list. You can track endless prompts. The job is to track the ones that matter.

Step 2: Organize by how your business already runs

Once you have the goals, group prompts into lenses: the natural categories your marketing already works around. For most brands, that means active campaigns, product lines, or markets.

If the marketing team owns a campaign, the prompts for that campaign should have a built-in owner. Someone will work to move those numbers. A prompt set nobody owns is just a report.

Step 3: Only track what you'll act on

Here's the filter many brands skip. Before you lock in a topic, ask whether your team can actually do anything about the result.

Take healthcare. A query like "best cardiologist" or "best urgent care" typically returns a directory or listicle, and authority sites like ZocDoc and Mayo Clinic are hard to outrank. Tracking that prompt tells you little you can act on. Add the brand and the picture changes. A prompt like "is [health system] good for orthopedic care?" or "[health system] vs. [local hospital] for pediatrics" draws on sources you control, such as your website, location pages, and reviews. You can chase those rankings.

The same logic applies to queries with constantly changing answers. "If it's something that's going to [change by the day], it's not worth anything," says Omer Eliaz, VP of Product at Yext. You want a trend line that shows whether you're improving over time. That only works when the underlying answers are stable enough to measure and worth acting on relative to your goals from Step 1.

A topic earns its place when it has three things: an owner, a content plan, and a stable trend line.

Step 4: Map the full customer journey

Finally, within each topic, cover the different ways someone might ask the same question depending on where they are in their journey. That runs from general awareness ("what is [category]?") to active comparison ("[brand] vs. [competitor]") to purchase intent and post-purchase loyalty.

This matters because brands often find their share of voice is strong on how-to questions but thin on comparison queries. Mapping angles lets you spot those gaps without reviewing every individual prompt. It also gives different teams a stake in the outcome.

Brand-level and location-level tracking answer different questions

Brand-level tracking is essential. Research often starts before anyone types "near me" or a specific market question. Someone might ask, "How do I get started with a Roth IRA?" or "Which pizza chain does a decent gluten-free?" If AI gives a wobbly answer to that first question, your locations may never get considered.

But what that brand-level tracking can't tell you is why you're losing. As people move down the funnel, their questions turn local. They want opening hours, menu items, and reviews for a specific place. Those answers draw on location-level signals, and when the signals are missing or inconsistent, LLMs won't take chances. They choose a brand that's easier to verify. (Read more about what affects AI visibility.)

Specific pages win those moments. Yext Research looked at Q1 2026 citations across 10 brands and 1,800 U.S. locations. It found that 70% of intent queries cited pages built for that specific intent more often than general local pages.

So track both levels. Brand-level prompts show where you stand while customers research. Location-level prompts show which locations win when they're ready to choose. (The Visibility Score in Yext Scout is available at both levels, so you can see the full path in one place.)

Build the set, then build on it

Defining the right prompt set isn't a one-time setup. It's a method that starts with your goals, respects how your team works, and stays grounded in what you can influence.

That's what Yext Scout helps brands do, now at both the brand and location level. See how Scout works.