How prompts work
Understanding Heading's prompt generation and quality scoring
Prompts are the foundation of Heading's monitoring. Each prompt represents a question that real people might ask an AI assistant about your business category.
Automatic prompt generation
When you add a property, Heading generates prompts automatically based on:
- Your domain: what your website is about
- Business vertical: your industry category (legal, plumbing, SaaS, etc.)
- Location: where your business operates
- Competitor landscape: what people ask when comparing options
Generation covers informational, transactional, comparison, and recommendation intents. A free property starts with a 20-prompt snapshot portfolio. Paid plan quotas are 50 (Starter), 100 (Growth), or 250 (Scale). See Plans.
Prompt quality scoring
Not all prompts are equally useful. Heading scores each prompt on three factors:
| Factor | What it measures | Score range |
|---|---|---|
| Specificity | Does the prompt mention category + location + intent? | 1-5 |
| Citation likelihood | Does this type of query typically generate source links? | 1-5 |
| Competitive density | How many brands compete for this prompt? | 1-5 |
Combined score out of 15. Prompts scoring below 8 are flagged for review.
High-scoring prompts are specific and likely to generate citations. "Best personal injury lawyer in Manchester" scores higher than "what is a lawyer" because it's more likely to cite a specific firm.
Prompt portfolio score
Your prompt portfolio score (0 to 100) measures how well-balanced and effective your set of active prompts is. A higher score means your prompts cover a wider range of the questions real people ask about your industry, which gives you better visibility data.
The score is calculated across six dimensions, each weighted by importance:
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Tier balance | 25% | Distribution across prompt tiers: brand, category, problem/solution, and adjacent queries. A balanced portfolio covers all four. |
| Specificity | 20% | Ratio of specific prompts (mentioning location, brand, or intent) to broad ones. Target: 60% specific. |
| Buying stage | 20% | Coverage across awareness, consideration, and decision stages. All three stages should be represented. |
| Conversational tone | 15% | How natural your prompts sound: word count, question marks, and phrasing style. AI assistants respond better to conversational queries. |
| Question variety | 10% | Mix of question types (what, how, why, which, other). Higher entropy means better coverage of how people actually ask questions. |
| Competitor mentions | 10% | Percentage of prompts that reference competitors. Target: around 20%, enough to track comparisons without over-indexing. |
Each dimension is scored 0 to 100, then combined using the weights above to produce your overall portfolio score.
A score of 70+ is strong. Below 40 means your prompts are clustered in a narrow range and you're likely missing important queries. Use the radar chart on the Prompts page to see which dimensions need attention.
Improving your score
- Suggest more per tag in underrepresented segments. Heading generates prompts to fill the gaps (see Tags & segmentation)
- Track suggested prompts that complement your existing set
- Add custom prompts for competitor comparisons or specific buying stages you're missing
Managing prompts
You can:
- Track: include in monitoring (default for high-scoring prompts)
- Reject: exclude from monitoring (useful for irrelevant prompts)
- Add custom: write your own prompts for specific monitoring needs
- Bulk actions: track, reject, or delete multiple prompts at once
- Tag: assign tags for segmentation and filtering (see Tags & segmentation)