How to choose AI questions potential clients might ask about your expertise
Turn real client problems into a useful question set, with worked examples and a worksheet you can reuse.
On this page
“Who are the best marketing experts?” is easy to type and difficult to use.
It could return authors, agency owners, conference speakers or people who teach marketing. If you help software companies repair their paid-search campaigns, most of that answer may have little to do with the work you sell.
Choose questions you would care about receiving an enquiry from. That gives you a reason to inspect the answer and a useful boundary for the scan.
Start with a real enquiry if you have one
Look at the language people use before they know which service they need. An enquiry might say, “We're spending more on Google Ads, but the demos aren't turning into customers.” Your service menu might call that acquisition strategy. Keep the client's problem in the question.
For example, you could test:
Who can help a US B2B software company diagnose poor lead quality from Google Ads?
This example is invented to show the method. It is not a measured popular prompt.
Sales notes, contact-form messages and questions asked during consultations can all supply wording. Remove private details before putting anything into an AI service. You need the problem and relevant constraints, not the original message or the sender's identity.
If you have no enquiries yet, use the work you can credibly deliver as the starting point. Write a plausible client question and label it as your assumption. Suggested questions can help you begin, but a generated list cannot establish what people are asking or how often.
Decide which details affect the hire
Some constraints are useful. A lawyer's jurisdiction, a consultant's working language or experience with a particular business model may change who a client would consider.
Other details only make it easier for the engine to guess you. Adding your small town, previous employer, unusual qualification and exact newsletter topic can turn a discovery question into a description of one person.
Before adding a detail, ask whether a client who does not know you would use it to choose help. Keep the details that affect the decision.
Here's how that changes the question:
| Starting question | More useful test | Why change it? |
|---|---|---|
| Who is the best consultant? | Which independent consultants help B2B software companies with Google Ads? | Identifies work and client type |
| Who can help with marketing? | Who can diagnose why paid-search leads are not converting into sales opportunities? | Describes a problem someone might hire for |
| Which marketing agencies should I hire? | Which individual consultants offer paid-search audits for software companies? | Asks for the kind of provider you are |
| Is Alex Morgan an expert? | Which consultants advise on Google Ads for software businesses? | Lets a name emerge without supplying it |
All examples in this table are illustrative. They are candidates for testing, not search-volume research.
Give each question a different job
Five minor variations of the same sentence can fill a scan without exploring much of your offer. For an initial set, cover distinct reasons someone might need you.
An independent paid-search consultant might choose these five illustrative questions:
- Which individual consultants offer Google Ads audits for US B2B software companies?
- Who can help a software company diagnose poor lead quality from paid search?
- Which independent specialists advise software companies moving Google Ads management in-house?
- Who offers a second opinion on a B2B software company's paid-search account?
- Which consultants help software companies decide whether to fix or rebuild an existing Google Ads account?
The consultant would drop any question about work they do not offer. There is no value in measuring visibility for a service you would decline.
Five questions can give you a useful first inspection of a narrow offer. They cannot represent every way people ask about your field. Start there, read what comes back, and expand when you can name a missing area worth measuring. Gistful's free scan supports five questions; paid plans allow larger sets. Current plan limits
Separate learning questions from recommendation questions
“How do I improve lead quality?” might return a useful explanation without naming anyone. “Who can help me improve lead quality?” asks for a provider.
Both could matter to your business. Your article might be cited in the educational answer, while your name might appear in the recommendation. Record those outcomes separately so you know which opportunity you are examining.
Likewise, “What does Alex Morgan do?” can expose a mistaken biography or an outdated association. It is a useful identity check. Keep it outside your discovery baseline, because the question has already supplied the name you are looking for.
Gistful excludes name-recognition questions from live discovery coverage. You can read the scope and scoring rules before interpreting a percentage.
Keep a short reason beside each question
Use a note such as “based on an anonymized enquiry about lead quality” or “tests the audit service described on my website.” If you cannot explain why the question belongs, consider leaving it out.
A small worksheet is enough:
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Exact question | The wording you will submit |
| Service or topic | The work it relates to |
| Origin | Enquiry, conversation, or your own hypothesis |
| Relevant constraint | Location, industry or language, if needed |
| Useful outcome | A recommendation, an accurate description, or a cited resource |
This also prevents an attractive result from becoming the reason you keep a question. Choose the question for its relevance before you know whether it mentions you.
Once the questions are saved, use the guide to checking whether AI recommends you as an expert to collect the answers.
Preserve the questions when you rescan
Once you have a baseline, leave its wording alone for comparisons. If your first scan asks about software companies in the US and your second asks about local retailers, a different list of names would be unsurprising.
You can change direction as your offer changes. Save the new questions, but treat that as a new baseline. Gistful withholds direct comparisons when the questions or other required scope differ. How rescans work
Write your first five candidates, then remove any that describe work you would not take on or depend on a client already knowing your name. Save the remaining wording before running the scan. If you want a fill-in version of this process, use the buyer-question worksheet.