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In traditional SEO, you optimize for keywords. In AI search monitoring, you optimize for prompts — the natural-language questions that real people type into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview. Your prompts are the single most important part of your Citivus setup. The better your prompts reflect real customer behavior, the more actionable your data will be.

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How prompts work

When you add a prompt to Citivus, here’s what happens behind the scenes:
1

Citivus sends your prompt

Your prompt is sent to each AI provider you’re monitoring (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overview).
2

Each provider generates a response

A natural-language answer that may mention brands, products, and sources.
3

Citivus analyzes the response

Your brand mentions, rank, sentiment, competitor mentions, and cited sources are extracted.
4

This repeats on a schedule

Daily by default, so you can track changes over time.
Each prompt generates one response per provider per run. So if you have 10 prompts running across 3 providers, you’ll get 30 data points per day.
Prompts vs. keywords — Keywords are short search terms like “best EV 2026.” Prompts are full questions like “Which electric vehicle is best for long-range driving in the USA?” AI assistants respond to conversational questions, not keyword fragments — so your prompts should reflect how people actually talk to AI.

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How AI models process your prompts

AI models don’t just match keywords — they understand intent and context:
  • Intent recognition — The AI determines what the user is trying to accomplish (compare products, find the best option, understand a topic)
  • Context analysis — The AI considers geographic context, recency, and the specificity of the question
  • Response generation — The AI compiles information from its training data and cited sources to generate a comprehensive answer
This means that small changes in prompt wording can significantly change which brands appear and where they rank.

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Anatomy of an effective prompt

The best prompts combine clear intent with specific context:
Think about the exact questions your ideal customer would type into ChatGPT. Browse Reddit, Quora, and social media to find the real questions people are asking about your industry.

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Preparing your prompt topics

Before creating prompts, organize them into topic clusters that cover different aspects of your business:
  • “Best [product category] in 2026”
  • “Top [product type] for [specific use case]”
  • “[Product A] vs [Product B] comparison”

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Creating prompts in Citivus

You can create prompts in three ways:
From the Prompts Monitor page, click the “New Prompt” button. Enter your prompt text, select the AI providers to monitor, and choose the target location.
Each prompt in your list has an Edit button. Click it to modify the prompt text, change providers, update the location, or pause monitoring.
Create Monitoring Prompt dialog showing prompt input, AI suggested prompts, provider checkboxes for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overview, and geographic location selector

The New Prompt dialog with AI-suggested prompts, provider selection, and location settings

Provider selection matters. Each AI provider may give different results for the same prompt. We recommend monitoring across all available providers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overview) for the most comprehensive picture. You’ll see per-provider performance breakdowns on the prompt detail page.

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Understanding prompt status

Each prompt has a status that tells you how it’s performing: On the Prompts Monitor page, you can toggle between Active and Stopped tabs to manage your prompt library.
Prompts Monitor page with prompt table showing status badges, mention rates, average rank, net sentiment, and provider icons

The Prompts Monitor page showing active prompts with status, mention rate, and performance metrics

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Managing prompt limits

Your subscription plan determines how many active prompts you can run simultaneously.
  • Active prompts count toward your plan limit
  • Stopped prompts do not count toward your limit
  • Deleted prompts are permanently removed and free up a slot
If you’ve hit your prompt limit but want to test new prompts, stop some lower-priority prompts instead of deleting them. Stopped prompts retain their historical data, so you can reactivate them later without losing anything.
You can view your current usage under Preferences > Tenant Usage & Info.

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Prompt run frequency

Citivus runs your prompts daily at a set time (shown on each prompt card). This means:
  • You get at least one new data point per provider per prompt every day
  • Trends become visible after a few days of data collection
  • The “Last Update” timestamp on each prompt tells you when the latest run occurred
On the prompt detail page, you’ll see the run schedule displayed as: “Frequency: At 04:00 PM, every day (local time)“

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What good looks like

After a week of monitoring, you should be able to see:
  • Which prompts your brand consistently appears in (top performers)
  • Which prompts your brand struggles with (low visibility / needs attention)
  • How your mention rate trends over time
  • Which competitors appear in the same prompts
Use these insights to guide your content strategy, PR efforts, and competitive positioning.
Last modified on February 13, 2026