- Owner
- Analyst with front-desk staff
- Cadence
- Built once per quarter
- Time box
- Two to three hours
- Output
- Frozen, dated panel
What a prompt panel is
A prompt panel is the list of questions a business tracks. Bay Area AEO builds one for each client from the real questions customers ask AI, such as "best family dentist in San Mateo," and runs it across every major AI platform each month. The panel is the measuring instrument. If it is built from guesses, the measurements describe guesses; if it is built from the words customers use, the monthly numbers describe the business's real exposure.
A panel of 10 to 30 questions is enough for one service and city slice. Smaller panels move too much from month to month; larger ones take a day to run and rarely change the decision.
Where the questions come from
Collect raw wording before writing a single question. Good sources, in rough order of value: notes from phone calls and booking forms, the questions customers ask at the counter, the words in reviews, emails that start with "do you…", and staff memory of the last ten new customers. Write each one down as the customer said it, including the city or neighborhood and any condition they mentioned.
The questions Bay Area AEO publishes on its city pages show the shape to aim for. For San Mateo it lists "Japanese restaurant in downtown San Mateo" and "Pediatric dentist in San Mateo." For San Jose, "Best pho near Story Road in San Jose." For Oakland, "Tenant rights lawyer in Oakland." Each names a service and a place, and several add a condition. Those conditions are what an assistant uses to choose between otherwise similar businesses.
The panel mix
| Type | Shape | Questions in a 20-question panel |
|---|---|---|
| Category and city | Plumber in Daly City | 3 to 4 |
| Neighborhood | Ethiopian restaurant in Temescal | 3 to 4 |
| Condition | Dentist in Hayward that takes Medi-Cal | 5 to 6 |
| Urgency or time | Emergency plumber in San Jose open on Sunday | 2 to 3 |
| Comparison or advice | How much is lip filler in San Jose and where should I go? | 3 to 4 |
The condition row gets the most weight because conditional questions are where recommendations are decided. An assistant asked for "a dentist" can name anyone; an assistant asked for "a dentist who is good with anxious patients and takes Delta Dental" has to find a business whose pages say exactly that, backed up by its listings and its reviews.
Procedure
- Gather raw wording
Collect 40 to 60 real customer phrasings from the sources above. Keep spelling and word order.
- Group and pick
Group near-duplicates and keep the clearest phrasing from each group. Fill the five types to the counts in the table.
- Add the place
Make sure every question names a city or neighborhood the business serves. Customers who leave the place out get answers based on their location, which the audit cannot reproduce.
- Check for fit
Remove any question for a service the business does not offer. A panel that includes it will report a miss the business never wanted to win.
- Freeze and date
Save the panel as a numbered list with the date. From here on, the wording does not change until the next quarter.
- Start a waiting list
New questions heard during the quarter go on a separate list and join the panel at the next freeze.
Done when
Using city data to set priorities
When a business serves several cities, start the panel with the largest audience. Bay Area AEO publishes estimates for each city it covers; for San Jose it puts adults who use AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini at about 382,000, and for San Mateo at about 41,000. (Estimates published by Bay Area AEO according to Pew Research (June 2026); population from the California Department of Finance (January 2026); adult share from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.) Weight the panel toward the cities where more customers are asking.
Wording rules
Keep the customer's grammar, including questions that are not full sentences. "Emergency plumber in San Jose open on Sunday" is how people type, and assistants treat it differently from a polished question. Keep brand names customers use, such as an insurance plan or a product, because those are the conditions that decide answers. Leave the business's own name out of the panel; a question that names the business tests recall of the name, which belongs in a separate brand check. Write one question per line and number the lines, so a re-test can refer to "question 14" without ambiguity.
Quarterly panel review
At each quarter, read the waiting list with the owner. Add the questions customers asked most, retire any question for a service the business has dropped, and save the new panel with a new date. Keep the old panel in the folder so year-on-year comparisons stay possible.
Store the panel where the re-test analyst can open it read-only, and print a copy for the quarterly review so the owner can mark questions to retire or add.