Avoid prompts that create false positives
Separate prompts into three types: branded, comparison, and non-branded.
Branded prompts trigger your brand name and inflate visibility, which doesn’t tell you whether you’re being recommended naturally.
For example, if I ask a question like “Do Toyotas have good resale value for families?”, the natural response will be to mention Toyota, because the question is about Toyota. If I’m measuring mentions, then every single question that starts and centres on my brand name is a wasted prompt.
I could simply increase the number of questions that include my brand name and thereby improve my mentions. Branded prompts definitely have value, particularly around sentiment, but it’s worth reviewing your prompts to ensure that they’re not telling you needless information.
Consideration around branded prompts should also apply to competitors. For instance, if we used the prompt, “Do Mazdas have good resale value for families?”, we are extremely unlikely to see a mention of a rival brand.
Comparison prompts sometimes trigger your brand, but they still skew results depending on how the question is phrased. So, a question like “how does the comfort of Hyundai cars compare to for road trips?”, might mention other car types, or go into detail about Hyundai.