What Is a Brand Prompt Audit and How Do I Run One?

A brand prompt audit is a structured test of how AI engines answer the specific questions your buyers ask, measuring whether your brand appears, in what position, with what sentiment, and against which competitors. You assemble a representative prompt set across buyer intents, run each prompt on every engine you care about, and score the results into a repeatable spreadsheet.

What does the audit measure?

A complete audit is 360-degree: it spans buyer intents and engines rather than one query on one tool. Score each prompt on:

• Presence — does your brand appear at all in the answer?
• Position — first mention, mid-list, or last?
• Sentiment — described positively, neutrally, or with a caveat?
• Competitors — which rivals appear, and how often?
• Citations — which of your URLs (if any) are linked as sources?

Recording all five turns anecdotes into a scorecard you can trend over time.

How do I build the prompt set?

Group prompts by intent so the audit reflects a real buyer journey. Problem-aware prompts ("how do I reduce SaaS onboarding drop-off"), solution-aware prompts ("best onboarding software for B2B"), and brand-aware prompts ("is [your brand] good for enterprise") each surface different visibility gaps. Mine your own site search, sales-call notes, and support tickets for the exact phrasing buyers use. Test on the engines your audience uses — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews cover most B2B research.

How do I score it into a spreadsheet?

Build a grid with prompts as rows and engines as columns, then log presence, position, and sentiment per cell. Assign a simple weight — say 3 points for a first mention, 1 for a later mention, 0 for absence — and sum per engine to get a share-of-voice snapshot. Because AI answers vary between sessions, run each prompt in a fresh, logged-out session two or three times and record the mode.

Manual auditing works for a first pass but degrades fast past a few dozen prompts and engines. Prompt research automates the collection so your audit becomes a living tracking baseline instead of a one-time spreadsheet — letting you re-run the exact set after each content change and attribute movement to what you shipped.