Your questions define what brandflare measures. They're the AI era's keywords: the finite, repeatable things buyers ask, against which your visibility is scored. This page covers how your questions are written, what makes them trustworthy, and how to read Questions & Prompts, the section that shows your results question by question, engine by engine. In the wider industry a tracked question is called a prompt, and the grid a prompt matrix.
What a question is here
A question is something a real buyer in your category asks an AI assistant: "best X for Y", "X vs Y", "is X worth it", asking for a recommendation or a comparison. Good questions share two properties:
- They don't name your brand. "Tell me about Acme" tests whether the engine knows you exist; "what's the best project tracker for small teams" tests whether the engine recommends you, which is the one that moves revenue. Questions that do name your brand can be tracked, but they don't count toward your Visibility or your Flare score.
- They're things people actually ask. The set should mirror real buying conversations, not marketing language.
How your questions are written
When you add a brand, brandflare writes its questions from the brand's category, its competitors and its market. A UK brand gets questions a UK customer would ask, in pounds, with the shops and rivals they know. Your plan sets how many you can track: 15 on Starter, 40 on Plus, Pro and Agency (plans and limits). The tab row shows how many your plan allows.
The set is yours to shape:
- Add questions. Several at once, one per line, with a live count of how many fit your plan. Repeats are skipped.
- Pause a question that doesn't fit. A paused question stops being checked, and its history stays.
Shape it early, then leave it mostly alone. Prompt tracking only produces meaningful trends on a stable yardstick. If the questions change every week, a rising score could mean rising visibility or merely easier questions, and you'd never know which.
Topics
Every question has a topic, a word or two such as Pricing or Delivery. A brand's questions are sorted into six topics at most, and you can filter the list by topic; the filter shows the busiest few, with the rest under Other. Questions you add are given a topic a moment after you save. There is nothing to pick.
Topics turn forty rows into a handful of stories: you're named on Pricing and absent on Delivery is a finding you can hand to someone.
The grid
Questions & Prompts lays your results out as a grid: one row per question, one column per engine (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google Search, Perplexity and Claude). Each cell answers the smallest question there is: did this engine's answer name your brand, and where?
- A cell shows 1st, 2nd and so on: your place among the brands the answer named. Being the first brand recommended and being the seventh name in a comparison table are both mentions, but they're very different outcomes.
- Or it shows Not named.
- Named by counts how many engines name you on that question.
- Each question also says how often it's asked and what kind of question it is.
A key above the table explains the cells, and the filters cut the list to All, Not always named, Named everywhere or Paused.
Reading an answer
Every cell is backed by a stored answer. Open one and you read the response as the customer would have seen it, with headings, lists and tables intact, your brand highlighted and competitors underlined. Beside it are the brands the answer named, in order, with how it described each, the websites it used, and where it was asked from. Nothing in the grid is more than one click from its receipts.
Reading the grid well
This is where a headline number stops being a number and becomes a diagnosis. Patterns worth looking for:
- Empty rows: questions where no engine names you. These are your losses, and your content roadmap: each is a buyer question your material doesn't currently win. Not always named finds them.
- Empty columns: one engine that leaves you out while others don't. Engines disagree because what they've learned and what they retrieve differ; a lagging engine tells you where your footprint is thin. It also drags Consistency in your Flare score.
- Named, but last: rows where you appear in a poor position every time. You're in the consideration set but framed as an afterthought. These often respond to work faster than empty rows do.
- Flickering cells: named one week and absent the next. You're on the edge of the engine's answer, and small improvements in the sources it draws on can tip these your way.
Because engines give different answers from one run to the next, treat a single change as a hint and a direction that holds across checks as a finding.
How the grid feeds everything else
Each cell is one observation. Visibility is the share of cells where you were named; Average position comes from the places; All engines counts the rows where every engine named you. Competitor mentions come out of the same answers, which powers share of voice and the head-to-head in Competitors. The missed questions feed What to do next on your overview, Recommendations, and the plays in Export Report. The grid refreshes with every weekly check.
Fifteen questions or forty
Fifteen questions cover your core buying questions. Forty add breadth, with more sub-niches, use cases and comparisons, and correspondingly steadier figures, since every extra question is another observation averaging out the engines' noise. If your category is broad, the number of questions is usually the most consequential difference between plans.