How Do I Find the Questions My Customers Ask AI About My Category?

You can't see what people type into ChatGPT. You can rebuild that list from your support chats, Search Console, community threads and careful AI drafting, then test 100 questions across engines to see where your brand shows up.

Your customers used to type "sunscreen oily skin" into Google and scroll. Now many of them ask ChatGPT "Which sunscreen works best for oily skin in humid weather?" and get one answer with two or three brand names in it. If your brand isn't in that answer, you never get the visit.

No AI company shares its prompt data with brands, so you can't export a list of what people ask. You can build a reliable stand-in from sources you already have. This guide walks through six steps, with a target of 100 questions you can track every month.

Why a keyword list isn't enough

Prompts are longer and carry more context than search keywords. A keyword is "project management tool". A prompt is "What project management tool works for a 5-person agency that bills by the hour?" The extra detail changes which brands the AI names.

Many AI answers don't touch the live web at all. In Intura's study of 1,250 Bahasa Indonesia prompts in Gemini, only 34.2% triggered a Google Search. For the other two thirds, Gemini answered from what it already knew, so your newest blog post had no chance to be read.

What people ask and what AI answers often don't match. In Intura's travel research, visa and passport questions made up 27% of Indonesian travel questions, yet they showed up in at most 2.7% of AI answers. A gap like that is where a brand with a clear, useful page can get named.

Step 1: Collect what customers already ask you

Your sales and support team hears these questions every day. Pull the last 90 days of conversations and copy every question word for word. Keep the original grammar and slang. "Bisa COD ga?" and "Is this safe during pregnancy?" are both real prompts someone will type into an AI.

• Support tickets and live chat logs
• WhatsApp Business and Instagram DM conversations
• Sales call notes and demo recordings
• Questions from webinars, events and onboarding calls
• Reasons given in lost-deal notes

Tag each question with a topic and count how often it repeats. The questions that come up every week go to the top of your list.

Step 2: Pull question phrasing from Google

Google Search Console already holds the questions people type to reach your site. Open Performance, then Search results, add a Query filter and choose Custom (regex). Paste one of the patterns below and export the results (Search Console Help).

English questions:

^(what|how|which|why|is|are|can|does|do|should|best)\b

Bahasa Indonesia questions:

\b(apa|apakah|bagaimana|gimana|berapa|kenapa|mengapa|mana|bisa|cara)\b

Next, search your 10 main keywords and open the People Also Ask box. Each question you expand loads more. Then type your category followed by "vs", "for", "or" and "without" and note what autocomplete suggests, for example "CRM for" or "sunscreen vs".

Step 3: Read where people ask each other

People ask strangers the questions they don't ask brands. Read the threads where your buyers compare options and look for three patterns: "Is X worth it?", "X or Y for my situation?" and "Has anyone tried X?" These become your comparison prompts.

• Reddit (r/indonesia, r/smallbusiness, or the subreddit for your category)
• Threads and TikTok comments on posts about your category
• The Diskusi tab on Tokopedia and product Q&A on Shopee
• Google Play and App Store reviews of apps in your category
• Quora and local forums

These sources matter for a second reason: AI engines cite community and video platforms heavily. In Intura's study of 1,000 Indonesian keywords, YouTube was the most cited domain in Google AI Overviews, with 19.3% of 7,140 citations. The threads you read today are part of what AI repeats tomorrow.

Step 4: Rewrite each item as a full prompt

Turn every keyword and short question into the sentence a real buyer would type. Follow four rules:

1. Write a full question.
2. Add one real constraint, such as budget, city, team size or use case.
3. Use the language your customers use, including informal Bahasa Indonesia.
4. Leave your brand name out of discovery questions, since buyers at that stage don't know you yet.

From keyword to prompt

Keyword	Prompt a buyer would type
CRM	What CRM is easiest for a 10-person sales team that sells through WhatsApp?
moisturizer murah	Moisturizer bagus di bawah Rp150 ribu buat kulit berminyak apa ya?
jasa SEO Jakarta	Berapa biaya jasa SEO per bulan untuk toko online kecil di Jakarta?
travel insurance Japan	Do I need travel insurance to apply for a Japan visa as an Indonesian citizen?

Step 5: Fill the gaps with AI, then check every result

Once you have real questions, ask ChatGPT or Claude to suggest more for stages and personas you haven't covered. Use the prompt below and swap in your details.

You are a [persona] in [city/country] looking for [category]. List 20 questions you would ask an AI assistant before you buy. Group them into: understanding the problem, comparing options, ready to buy. Write them the way a real person types, including short and informal wording.

Treat what comes back as guesses. Keep a generated question only if it matches something you found in steps 1, 2 or 3, or if it shows search demand in Keyword Planner. AI will happily invent questions that nobody asks.

Step 6: Organize 100 questions and test them

Put every question in one spreadsheet with these columns: question, language, stage (discovery, consideration or decision), persona, source and how often it appeared.

Aim for 100 questions. With 100, a brand named in 40 of them has a true mention rate somewhere between about 30% and 50%. With only 20 questions and the same 40% result, that range widens to roughly 22% to 61%, which is too loose to act on. How many prompts you need to track AI brand mentions explains the math.

Run each question in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity three to five times, because the same prompt gives different answers on different runs. For each answer, record whether your brand appears, its position, which competitors appear and which websites are cited. Repeat the test every month.

What to do with the results

Sort your questions into three groups and act on each one differently.

• Competitors are named and you aren't: write a page that answers that exact question with specific facts, prices and examples.
• AI cites a third-party site, such as a review site, a marketplace or a YouTube channel: work on getting your brand covered on that site.
• No brand is named, or the answer is vague: publish the clearest answer first. These are your easiest wins.

Doing this by hand vs with a tool

A spreadsheet and a free ChatGPT account are enough to start. The work gets heavy once you test 100 questions on three engines, five times each, every month. That is 1,500 answers to read and log.

Data AI Search by Intura collects the questions people ask about your category in your market's language, runs them on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek, and shows which brands and sources each engine names. You can start with a free AI visibility audit.