Tracking 50 queries vs 10 — diminishing returns after ~12 in my data
Pro plan gives me 50 monitored slots. Tracked all 50 for 6 weeks. Conclusion: ~12 of them carry 90 % of the actionable signal.
What the bottom 38 looked like:
- Long-tail variants of the same intent ('best X for Y' vs 'top X tools for Y' — answer set basically identical)
- Queries my buyers actually don't ask in AI (they go to Google directly for 'compare X vs Y')
- Brand-name-explicit queries ('what is <my brand>') — useful for hallucination check but not for citation lift
My current shortlist:
- 4 unbranded buyer-intent queries (where I'm not mentioned today and want to be)
- 3 competitor-comparison queries
- 3 'how to' queries adjacent to my use case
- 2 brand-name probes
Anyone else thinning their tracked query list down? Or am I missing leverage?
3 replies
- Jess Wright
What's your cadence on the 2 brand-name probes? I added those as weekly but I'm wondering if monthly is enough since they change slowly.
- Petr VlčekFounder
Petr here — the 12-query pattern is very common in our data. There's a rough cliff around 10-15 queries where the marginal query adds noise rather than signal for most early-stage SaaS. For what it's worth, the defensive brand prompts (is [brand] still active, is [brand] legit) are worth the 2 slots even if they rarely fire — when they do fire wrong, you want to know fast.
This matches my experience almost exactly. I cut from 180 to 25 queries last month. The signal-to-noise ratio on the bottom 150 was terrible — lots of variance, no trend. The 25 I kept are all buyer-intent or direct competitor comparisons. Tracking anything else felt like watching random numbers.