The questions your customers put to AI assistants are longer, more specific and more conversational than the keywords most businesses track. You find them by listening to inquiries, reviews, People Also Ask and the searches you already appear for, instead of brainstorming. A short list of questions customers really ask is more useful than a long list of keywords you guessed at.
Why track questions instead of keywords?
Search boxes trained people to type fragments like "plumber Mobile." With an assistant, people write full sentences, such as "Who's a reliable plumber in Mobile who can come out today?" Those longer questions carry intent a keyword loses: urgency, budget, location, the specific problem. They're also what an assistant answers, so they're what you should measure.
The difference in practice
A keyword tool might tell you "emergency plumber" is a valuable term. A customer's question is "Is there a plumber who can come out tonight for a burst pipe in Mobile, and what will it cost?" That question tells you about urgency, the specific problem, the location and the price concern all at once, and an assistant will answer it with two or three names. Tracking the question shows you whether you're one of them, which tracking the keyword can't do.
Where to find the real questions
- Your inquiries. The first thing people ask when they call or email is the question they'd ask an assistant.
- Your reviews. Customers describe the problem they hired you to solve.
- People Also Ask. Google's expanding questions under your core searches. How to mine them.
- Search Console. The queries you already appear for (especially long, question-shaped ones) show what people search on the way to you.
- The assistants themselves. Ask one what questions people commonly have about your service, then sanity-check the list against the sources above.
An example: from inbox to tracking list
A landscaping company spends two weeks noting the first line of every inquiry. The raw list is messy: "do you do lawn care in Fairhope," "how much for a sod install," "can you come before the weekend," "do you haul away debris," and a dozen more. Grouped by intent, a few clusters emerge: pricing, availability, specific services, and the towns they cover.
From those, the company picks twelve questions that someone close to hiring would ask, rewritten naturally: "How much does sod installation cost in Fairhope?" "Which landscapers near Daphne do same-week service?" Those twelve become the list it asks the assistants every week, and each one it's missing from becomes a clear page to write.
Turn the raw list into a tracking list
You'll end up with dozens of questions. Group them by intent, then pick the ones that matter commercially: questions asked by someone close to hiring. "How much does a water heater replacement cost in Mobile?" is worth tracking. "What is a water heater?" probably isn't.
Keep the wording natural and add location where your customers would. A focused list of ten to twenty questions that you track properly is more useful than a hundred you check once.
Revisit the list every few months
Customer questions change with the seasons and the market. An HVAC company hears about heating in the fall and cooling in the spring; a tax preparer's questions shift entirely around filing deadlines. Review your tracking list every quarter against your recent inquiries. Retire questions nobody asks anymore, and add the new ones that have started coming in.
Ask them the way customers do
Run each question through the assistants your customers use, in the phrasing your customers use. Record whether you're named, whether your site is cited, and who appears instead. Repeat on a schedule, because the answers change. The AI answers feature in Speak Local does this across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
Use what you learn
Each question you're missing from gives you something to write. If assistants answer it with a competitor, look at what that competitor's page says that yours doesn't. If they answer it vaguely, you have a chance to write the clearest answer on the web. How to write it.
Questions to leave off the list
Not every question deserves tracking. Leave out purely informational questions with no buying intent, questions about services you don't offer, and questions so broad that no local business would be named in the answer. Tracking those spends effort on answers that were never going to send you a customer. Focus on the questions where being named is likely to lead to a call.
