Prompt
A prompt is the question or instruction a person types or speaks to an AI system, such as a chatbot or an AI search assistant, which the model reads to decide what to retrieve, generate, and cite in its answer.
Prompts are the new keywords. Where shoppers once typed a few terse search words, they now ask AI assistants full questions in plain language: which option suits a small kitchen, which model lasts longest, which brand people actually trust. The phrasing is longer, more specific, and closer to how someone would speak to a knowledgeable friend, so the surface a buyer reveals about their intent is far wider than a keyword box ever captured.
The practical move is to phrase content as direct answers to the prompts your buyers actually use. Lead with the answer in the first sentence, name the product or use case plainly, and let the supporting detail follow. Models tend to lift a clean, self-contained statement that resolves the question, so a paragraph that buries the conclusion three sentences down is less likely to be quoted than one that states it up front.
You cannot see every prompt a customer types, and AI systems paraphrase questions internally, so treat prompt-matching as informed inference rather than a precise targeting tool. Map the genuine decisions behind a purchase (fit, durability, comparison, trust) and answer those, instead of chasing exact wordings you can only guess at.