Prompts and topics are the foundation of how Cognizo measures your visibility across AI-powered search experiences. A thoughtful prompt structure helps you understand where your brand appears, how it is positioned, and how that visibility changes over time.
This guide covers how prompts and topics work, how to manage them effectively, and how to refine your setup as your strategy evolves.
What Are Topics?
Topics group related prompts under a shared theme or objective. Each topic can contain multiple prompts and is used to organize tracking, analysis, and reporting.
Topics in Practice
The best place to start when setting up your topics is to think about the reports you want to see. How do you want to slice and understand your data?
Each topic can hold multiple prompts and acts as the organizing layer for your tracking, analysis, and reporting so it's worth taking a moment to set them up in a way that mirrors how your team thinks about your business.
Some common ways to structure topics include:
Products or services — great if you want to compare performance or coverage across your offerings
Campaigns or initiatives — useful for tracking the impact of specific efforts over time
Funnel stages (e.g., research vs. purchase intent) — helpful if you care about understanding where in the journey your audience is engaging
Market or audience segments — ideal if you're targeting distinct groups and want to see how each is responding
When your topics are well-defined and tied to how you actually report, it becomes much easier to spot performance trends and identify gaps in your coverage before they become a problem.
If you aren't sure where to start, it can be helpful to think about the first report you'd want to share with your team and work backwards from there.
What Are Prompts?
Prompts are user-style queries that Cognizo runs daily across supported AI search engines. Each prompt reflects a real question someone might ask when researching a product, service, or solution.
At the prompt level, Cognizo tracks:
Visibility
Share of Voice
Sentiment
Brand and competitor citations
Tracking prompts over time helps you understand how AI systems interpret relevance, expertise, and trust for the queries that matter most to your business.
How to Think About Prompt Strategy
Strong prompts mirror how people actually ask questions when they are trying to make a decision. Rather than focusing only on broad category terms, effective prompt strategies are grounded in intent, context, and outcomes.
High-performing content across industries typically answers questions like:
When does someone need this, and what situation are they in?
What constraints or urgency influence the decision?
What does a successful outcome look like in a real scenario?
What alternatives or recommendations are commonly considered?
These same ideas translate directly into prompts you can track in Cognizo.
Translating Intent Into Prompts
Effective prompts often include:
A specific situation or trigger
A recommendation or comparison angle
An expected capability or outcome
Instead of generic prompts like:
“Best [product]”
“[Service] companies”
Consider prompts such as:
“Who is best at handling [specific situation or use case]?”
“Which companies specialize in [capability or outcome]?”
“What solutions are recommended when [constraint] applies?”
“Who should I choose if I need [service] with [requirement]?”
These prompts tend to surface clearer competitive visibility and more actionable insights.
How to Add Prompts for Tracking
Cognizo offers multiple ways to add prompts, depending on your workflow and scale.
Manual Entry
Add individual prompts by entering the exact query you want to track.
Assign prompts to an existing topic or create a new one.
Best for high-priority or highly specific queries.
CSV Import
Upload multiple prompts at once using a CSV file.
Assign prompts to existing topics or create new ones during import.
Ideal for bulk setup or migrations.
Prompt Suggestions
Generate platform-recommended prompts based on trends and competitor data.
Create suggestions for existing or newly created topics.
Review and add only prompts that align with your objectives.
Suggestions accelerate setup, but work best when combined with your own domain knowledge.
Reviewing and Managing Prompts
Prompt management is an ongoing process, not a one-time setup.
Access the Prompts Module
Navigate to the left-hand navigation bar.
Click Prompts.
View all prompts grouped by topic, with options to filter and sort.
Review Active Prompts
Select the Active tab.
Review prompt relevance based on current priorities.
Use filters to sort by topic, visibility, or competitor presence.
Deactivate or Remove Irrelevant Prompts
Select prompts that are no longer relevant or underperforming.
Click Deactivate to move them to the Inactive tab.
Reactivate later if needed.
Deactivation is recommended over deletion to preserve historical context.
Adding and Editing Prompts
Click Add Prompt to create a new prompt.
Enter the prompt text and assign it to a topic.
Create new topics as needed to keep organization clear.
Edit existing prompts to update wording or topic assignment.
Before deleting a topic, confirm there are no important prompts under it. Deleting a topic with active prompts may result in lost tracking data.
Using Prompt Suggestions to Optimize Coverage
The Suggestions tab helps uncover additional prompt opportunities.
Review ideas informed by trends and competitor activity.
Use Suggest More to generate additional suggestions for a topic.
Expect repetition after multiple runs.
Prioritize prompts that:
Reflect commercial or high-intent behavior
Surface competitor citations
Align with active marketing or sales motions
Monitoring Performance and Iterating
Each prompt includes its own performance metrics.
Track visibility and competitor presence over time.
Replace or refine prompts that consistently underperform.
Add new prompts as your offerings or customer questions evolve.
Smaller, regular refinements tend to produce better results than large, infrequent changes.
Tips and Best Practices
Start with a manageable set of prompts and expand gradually.
Combine suggested prompts with firsthand customer and industry knowledge.
Organize prompts under clear, non-overlapping topics.
Use prompt-level data to guide optimization decisions.
Revisit your prompt strategy as business goals and market conditions change.