Prompts are the engine behind everything Cognizo measures. Your key KPIs of visibility score, share of voice, and sentiment all start with a prompt.
What is a prompt?
A prompt is a user-style query that Cognizo runs on your behalf across supported AI search engines, every day. Each prompt is written to reflect a real question someone might ask when researching a product, service, or solution in your category. Prompts should mirror what your potential buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar platforms.
Prompts can be a single direct question, or they can represent a multi-turn conversation.
For example, a hydration drink brand might track a standalone question like:
"What's the best electrolyte powder for everyday hydration?"
Or they might frame a fuller buyer journey as one prompt:
"I've been feeling dehydrated even though I drink a lot of water. What's actually causing that, and what should I add to my routine?"
Both are valid. Single questions are easier to benchmark; multi-turn prompts capture more complex buying intent.
SEO tip: If you're used to tracking exact-match keywords, AI search works differently. When someone submits a prompt, the AI doesn't match words, it reads intent.
That means "best electrolyte powder for hydration" and "top drink additives to stay hydrated" are effectively competing for the same AI visibility, because the AI sees the same underlying intent behind both. Tracking prompts in Cognizo is really tracking the intents behind them, and that's the unit of competition in AI search.
What Cognizo tracks at the prompt level
For each prompt, Cognizo captures and tracks:
Visibility — whether your brand appears in the AI's response.
Share of Voice — how prominently your brand appears relative to other brands mentioned in the same response.
Sentiment — the tone of language the AI uses when describing your brand.
Citations — which sources the AI references when generating its response
These metrics are tracked at the individual prompt level and roll up to the topic level, giving you both granular detail and a high-level view across each area of your business.
How prompts and topics work together
Every prompt belongs to a topic. Topics define the competitive areas of your business where you want to win. Prompts are the individual questions that sit inside each topic and generate the data you use to measure whether you're winning there.
Think of it like this - The prompt is where the data gets created. The topic is where it becomes a story you can act on.
If you haven't set up topics yet, read Introduction to Topics first.
How prompts are added
Cognizo gives you three ways to add prompts: manual entry for individual prompts you want to configure carefully, CSV import for bulk setup or migrations, and Prompt Suggestions — platform-generated ideas based on trend data and competitor activity that you review and add selectively.
Active vs. inactive prompts
Active prompts run daily and contribute to your visibility data. Inactive prompts are paused - they don't generate new data, but their historical data is fully preserved. Deactivating a prompt is the recommended way to pause tracking without losing historical context.
What's next
Read Prompt Strategy & Best Practices to learn how to write and select prompts that surface meaningful data. When you're ready to get hands-on, the Step-by-Step Guide: Creating & Managing Prompts walks through every action in the platform.