Pulled my top 200 GSC queries into a prompt tracker — here's what survived the cut
Data engineer brain takes over: I exported 90 days of Search Console data, ran every converting query through a conversational rewrite script, and ended up with 200 candidate AI prompts to track. Then had to cut it to 25.
The filter I used, in order:
- Drop any query where the Google click-through was under 0.5 %. If people scroll past it on Google, they're probably not asking AI about it either.
- Drop anything where 3 runs on ChatGPT returned the same 5 incumbents with no variation. Those slots are locked, I can't win in the next 6 months.
- Keep anything phrased as a 'for [specific use case]' long-tail — those are winnable.
- Keep all 5 defensive brand probes ('is [brand] still active', 'is [brand] legit', etc.) regardless of volume.
Ended up with 21 buyer-intent + 4 defensive probes. Running weekly cadence on the top 10, monthly on the rest.
What surprised me: 6 of my surviving prompts were queries I had NO GSC data for — pure AI-native queries that nobody types into Google. Perplexity Sonar 3 is surfacing a completely different buyer intent layer than what Google ever showed me.
Anyone else finding that AI-native queries are a different population from organic search queries? Curious if this is category-specific.
3 replies
- Jess Wright
The defensive brand probe point is something I wish I'd added from day 1. Caught a bad Perplexity answer on 'is [brand] still maintained' 2 months in. Would have been embarrassing if a prospect saw it first.
- Nora
How did you handle the Perplexity Sonar 3 AI-native queries in your tracker — do you have a separate tab or do you just tag them differently from the GSC-derived ones?
The AI-native queries finding is real and i think it's the most underappreciated part of building a query strategy right now. My Search Console covers maybe 60% of my actual AI query surface. The other 40% are conversational prompts nobody types into Google. If you're only seeding from GSC you're missing a significant slice.