Is it better to track more prompts or fewer?

More prompts widen coverage but dilute attention. Start with the 10 to 50 questions your buyers actually ask (Prefer's Starter covers 30), get those clean and acted on, then add prompts as you add competitors, engines, and categories. A focused 50 you review weekly beats 300 you never read.

How many prompts do AI visibility tools include?

Prefer includes 30 on Starter, 150 on Growth and 500 on Scale, each tracked across all five engines. Elsewhere, entry plans usually meter prompts tightly, mostly at 15 to 50: Otterly's cheapest tier covers 15 and Semrush's 25, while Peec AI and LLM Pulse start at 50. Mid-market tiers move to 100 to 200. Check whether a prompt means one question on one engine or across all of them.

Should each engine count as a separate prompt?

It depends on the tool. Prefer counts one question tracked across its five engines as a single prompt; others charge per engine. Read the meter before comparing plans, because the same sticker price can buy very different real coverage.

How many prompts should I track for AI search visibility?

Start with 10 to 50 buyer prompts; Prefer's Starter tracks 30 across five AI engines. Scale to 150 or more as you add competitors and markets.

Javed Khatri Co-founder, Prefer

5 September 2026 Updated 19 September 2026 2 min read Answer

The short answer

How many queries should I monitor in AI search tools?

Start with 10 to 50 of the questions your buyers actually ask AI; Prefer's Starter tracks 30 across five engines for $24 a month. Grow toward 150 or more as you add competitors, engines and markets. A manual log handles 10 to 30, and most entry tool plans include 15 to 50.

Key takeaways

TechRadar's 2026 guide to tracking AI-search visibility recommends starting with a manual log of 10 to 30 buyer questions before paying for a tool. (TechRadar: how to track your brand's visibility in AI search)
Across tracked tools, entry plans meter prompts tightly: Otterly's Lite covers 15 prompts, Semrush's AI Visibility Base tier 25, and Peec AI and LLM Pulse Starter tiers 50 each (vendor pricing pages, checked in a rendered browser on 16 September 2026). (Prefer AI visibility tool pricing index)
Peec AI's plans track 50 prompts on Starter, 150 on Pro and 350 on Advanced, with 3 models of your choice on each of those tiers and 1, 2 and 5 projects, per its pricing page, checked in a rendered browser on 16 September 2026. (Peec AI pricing)

Start with the questions your buyers actually ask#

The right number of prompts is the set of questions your buyers actually ask AI, not a round figure. A prompt is one buyer question you send to an engine on a schedule and then check for whether you were named and cited.

A sensible starting point is small and specific:

10 to 30 questions if you are logging by hand. TechRadar’s 2026 guide to tracking AI visibility recommends starting with a manual log of 10 to 30 buyer questions before you pay for anything. That is enough to see your pattern across a category.
15 to 50 once you use a tool. That is what most entry plans include; Prefer’s Starter has 30. On 16 September 2026, Otterly’s cheapest tier covered 15 prompts and Semrush’s 25, while Peec AI and LLM Pulse started at 50.

Pick questions the way a buyer types them: category questions (“best [category] tool”), comparison questions (“[you] vs [rival]”), problem questions (“how do I [job]”), and your own brand questions (“is [you] any good”). Those four families are where recommendations actually get made.

Scale the count as you add competitors and engines#

Grow the number when you add more to compare, not just to hit a bigger figure. Three things push the count up honestly:

More engines. Tracking the same question across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews multiplies the work, since each engine answers differently. If your tool counts one question across five engines as one prompt, 50 goes far; if it charges per engine, the same 50 covers only ten questions.
More competitors. Watching how rivals get named across the same prompts is where share of voice comes from, and it widens the set worth tracking.
More categories or regions. A multi-product or multi-market brand needs a prompt set per segment.

Tool plans are tiered by prompt count. Peec AI’s plans go from 50 to 150 to 350 prompts, with 3 models of your choice on every tier. Ours at Prefer go from 30 to 150 to 500, with all 5 of our engines on every plan. On both, a bigger plan buys more prompts and projects, not more engines.

Our own core set is 50 prompts. When we build a page to answer a buyer question, we add that question as a prompt, and it joins the core set once the page ships. That is how one full run on 9 September 2026 covered 111 prompts: the core 50 plus 61 added for new pages.

Whatever number you choose, track the same prompts on a fixed schedule, log mentions and citations separately, and act on the gaps. Your set is big enough when all four question families are covered and every rival you track appears in at least one comparison prompt. The common failure is a set so large that nobody reviews the results each week, so the gaps never become fixes.

Our AI visibility tool pricing index shows how each tool meters its plans, and our guide to tracking AI citations covers the workflow. To see where AI engines name and cite you before you size a prompt set, run a free AI visibility audit.

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