AEO Prompt Architecture: Q0 Principles We Recommend For B2B SaaS Companies

If you want to measure and optimize your brand’s visibility in AI platforms, you’ll need to generate a set of sample prompts for your AI visibility tool to track. And the quality of the reports you get from any tool depend on how strategically you’ve built that sample prompt set. And of course, if you want a hand doing this at your company, we’d love to explore how we can help. If you don’t set up your sample prompts strategically, you’ll waste a lot of time and a lot of money to get a lot of noise. Most of the major answer engine optimization tools (and all the best ones today) rely on you creating a sample set of prompts. These tools feed those prompts into AI platforms over and over again, and bring the response data back to you. Any metrics regarding share of voice, mention rankings, sentiment, and citations that these tools give you comes from the responses to the prompts you tell it to input.



That means even if you’re using one of the best options on the market today, Top Source Media marketing the reports you get back will only be as useful as the prompts you put in. If you’re feeding your AI visibility tool prompts that don’t strategically map to your desired outcomes (or worse: letting them generate your prompts for you with AI), the numbers you get back won’t help your marketing strategy, either. Every major AEO tool’s plans come with a predetermined prompt cap, and you pay more to add extra prompts to the mix. Those initial prompt limits may seem like plenty at the beginning, but they burn up fast. Plus, some tools will charge you per prompt per platform as well. For example, if you want to track the prompt "What are the Top Source Media marketing three enterprise sales enablement software platforms? So for example, Scrunch’s starter plan includes 350 prompts. However, every individual prompt is assigned a single platform.



Scrunch currently tracks across seven platforms, which means if you were to track the prompt "What are the best alternatives to My Brand? " across all of them, that single input would cost you seven prompts-bringing you down to only 50 text inputs. Prompts are precious when it comes to AEO tool usage, so you need to make sure you’re only using ones that make sense. A well thought-out prompt architecture helps you do this, ensuring you’re getting as much value as you can from your plan. Most of these tools only begin recording AI responses to prompts when you start tracking them. They’re not giving you access to the vault of previous responses to identical prompts tracked by other marketers. This has a few implications when it comes to introducing new prompts to your reports. When you add, change, or reduce your prompt set, the tool will stop tracking the old prompts and begin tracking the new ones.



Your month-over-month reports will no longer be apples-to-apples comparisons-which means you’ll need to manually establish baselines for any before and after reports. Some of this is unavoidable. You can’t expect your prompt set to remain static over the years. But if you spend your first year on the tool tweaking your prompt set until you’re happy with it, you won’t get a clear idea of how your efforts are impacting your AI visibility. A strong prompt architecture helps you determine what prompts you need to track ahead of time, so you can start tracking results after your first month. There is no cookie-cutter template for building a sample prompt set. Your AEO prompt architecture should be specific to your own marketing strategy. However, there are a few universal principles that you should keep in mind when building a prompt set. Your AEO tool will run any prompt you feed it, and then tell you what the target LLM had to say in response at that moment.



Some of these tools will provide you with AI-generated advice for next steps (and it’s not always useful-or even sensical). It’s on you to turn what your AEO tool gives you into something you can work with. If your AEO reports give you information that doesn’t fall into at least one of these categories, you’re wasting time and labor. Therefore, limit your prompt set to bring back responses that you can materially work with. For most SMBs, this will likely mean using prompts that directly reference your offerings, your competitors’ offerings, the categories your offerings occupy, and any specific marketing awareness efforts you’ve made. You’ll be using your AI visibility tool to generate reports on your brand’s performance, so the first thing you should do is determine what information those reports will include. These reports should be informed by your marketing strategy’s approach to market segmentation as well as the campaigns and initiatives in your marketing strategy.