In SEO, you research keywords. You find out what people type into Google and make sure your site shows up for those terms. Prompt optimization is the same concept, but for AI. And the stakes feel different because with AI, there's no "page two." You're either in the answer or you don't exist.
So what exactly is prompt optimization?
Prompt optimization is the practice of identifying the specific questions people ask AI assistants, then making sure your content, brand, and online presence are strong enough to appear in those answers.
When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best email marketing tool for a small business?", that's a prompt. If your email marketing tool shows up in the response, great. If it doesn't, you've got a prompt optimization problem.
The concept is simple, but the execution has its own logic. Unlike keywords, where you can check search volume and competition in a tool like Ahrefs, AI prompts don't have public volume data. You can't look up how many people asked ChatGPT that exact question last month. You have to work with informed assumptions and test systematically.
Why should you care?
Because the prompts that matter most are the ones with buying intent, and those are exactly where AI recommendations carry the most weight.
Think about the difference between "what is email marketing?" (informational) and "what's the best email marketing tool for a solopreneur?" (buying intent). The first prompt might generate a Wikipedia-style explanation. The second generates a recommendation list. That second type is where customers are made or lost in the AI era.
If a potential customer asks an AI "what CRM should I use for my freelance business?" and your CRM isn't mentioned, you didn't just lose a ranking. You lost a sale you'll never know about. There's no impression data, no click-through rate to analyze. The opportunity just vanished silently.
How prompt optimization works in practice
The process breaks down into a few stages.
Discovery: Figure out what prompts your target customers are asking AI. Start with your own knowledge of customer pain points and buying questions. What do people ask you in sales calls? What questions come up in your support inbox? Those are your seed prompts.
Test them manually. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Ask those questions. See what comes back. Are you mentioned? Are your competitors? This manual research is tedious but eye-opening.
Categorization: Not all prompts are equal. Group them by intent. Informational prompts ("what is X?") matter for brand awareness. Comparison prompts ("X vs Y") matter for competitive positioning. High-intent prompts ("best X for Y") are where the money is. Focus your optimization energy where the intent is strongest.
Optimization: This is where it connects back to your content strategy. For each prompt you want to rank on, ask: does my website clearly, comprehensively answer this question? Is there enough structured content for an AI to understand that my product fits this use case? Am I mentioned on third-party sites that AI trusts?
The optimization isn't about gaming the AI. It's about making sure your online presence genuinely supports the claim that you're a good answer to that question.
Tracking: Prompts need ongoing monitoring. AI responses change over time as models update and new content enters their training data or retrieval pipeline. A prompt where you appeared last month might not surface your brand today.
This is where manual checking becomes impractical and tools matter. Mentionable automates this by tracking your visibility across multiple AI platforms for the prompts that matter to your business.
The honest truth
Prompt optimization is less mature than keyword research. There are no reliable volume metrics, the AI responses are non-deterministic (ask the same question twice, sometimes get different answers), and best practices are still being established.
But the core principle is timeless: know what your customers are asking, and make sure you show up with a good answer. The medium changed. The strategy didn't.
