Branded vs discovery prompts: why brands win their own name and disappear on discovery questions
A branded prompt names you: "What is Adviora?". A discovery prompt does not: "best tools for tracking AI search visibility". Brands tend to look fine on the first kind and vanish on the second, because the engine already knows what you are when you are named and has to choose among everyone when you are not. In Adviora's own panel, the branded prompt came back 4 of 4, and the unbranded category prompts named Adviora in 0 of 15 cells (15 October 2026, API and stored answers, one run each).
That is the blind spot. A tracker full of branded prompts reports good news and misses the questions where buyers decide.
Original element, to be supplied: one prompt set generated by Adviora from a real site, anonymized if needed, split into branded and unbranded and by stage.
How many prompts, and how many unbranded
There is no agreed number, so treat these as practitioner guidance, not a rule. On LinkedIn, Gururaj Pandurangi suggested that 80 to 90 percent of tracked prompts should be unbranded, with the brand's mention rate read as a range rather than a point. Alexis Fox suggested 30 to 50 buyer questions. Both are one person's view. Pick a size you will actually re-run, and say how many prompts and how many are unbranded next to every result.
Where good prompts come from
Three sources, in the order Adviora uses them:
- Your site's intent, ideal customer profile and messaging. Adviora crawls the website to identify them. The prompts describe the problems you solve, in the words your buyers use, not your product name.
- Search data. What Google shows for those topics tells you what people already ask and which results compete.
- People Also Ask. These questions, turned into prompts a buyer would type into an AI assistant, and the questions themselves, are a ready-made list of follow-ups.
If you do it by hand, start from the same three. Adviora's own method is described on the methodology page.
Group by stage: discovery, comparison, purchase
- Discovery: the buyer has a problem and no shortlist ("best ways to..." and "tools for...").
- Comparison: the buyer has a shortlist ("X vs Y", "alternatives to X").
- Purchase: the buyer wants price and fit ("X pricing for a team of 10", "is X worth it").
Report visibility per stage. Being strong in comparison and absent from discovery means buyers only meet you after someone else has put you on the shortlist.
Freeze the set before you change anything, and keep the misses
Write the prompt set down, give it a version, and do not edit it while you test a change. If you swap prompts after a bad run, you are measuring your edits, not your visibility. Practitioners commenting on the LinkedIn thread made the same point about freezing the set. Keep the prompts where you were absent: those misses are the list of work. If a prompt must change, start a new version and say so.
Per product and per market: one global average hides gaps
A brand with three products and two markets has six places to be missing. One global average hides them. Adviora tracks AI visibility per product and per market, so a result for the US and a result for India are two numbers, and a result for one product is not credited to another. A prompt such as "price in India" belongs in the India set only.
Common mistakes
- Only "what is X" prompts. They test whether the engine knows you exist, not whether it picks you.
- Hand-typed lists. They reflect what you already believe. Build prompts from site intent and search data.
- Dropping non-mentions. Removing the prompts where you did not appear makes the score rise and the information fall.
- Changing the set mid-test. See above.
- Reading one run as a result. Record the number of runs; see how to measure AI visibility and AI share of voice.
To see which questions your own site is missing on, start with the free AI visibility checker, which checks ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek and Perplexity as a one-off snapshot. For continuous tracking across six AI engines plus Google AI Overviews, see AI visibility tracking.
What buyers and practitioners say: sources
- Reddit: r/aeo (results depend on the prompts you feed the tool), r/GEO_optimization (posters who do not want to type prompts by hand), r/b2bmarketing (a scan comparing branded and discovery prompts).
- LinkedIn: Gururaj Pandurangi (80 to 90 percent unbranded; brand mention ranges); Alexis Fox (30 to 50 buyer questions); commenters on freezing the set.