What is a prompt?
A prompt is the full text handed to a model right before it responds, and for any real AI product that's almost always more than just what the user typed.
What most people call 'the prompt' is really just their own question. The text a model actually sees also usually includes instructions the product added ahead of time, the conversation so far, and often material pulled in specifically to help answer the question. The model's response is shaped by all of that combined, not by the user's words in isolation.
The instructions a product's own developers attach, invisible to the user, are called a system prompt, and they're worth understanding as a separate thing since they can change what a model is even allowed to do, like using a search tool. This site also uses prompt in a narrower, practical sense: a prompt basket is a set of realistic prompts a brand tracks over time to see how often and how favorably it comes up, which is measured as prompt volume.
Related
- System promptA system prompt is a set of instructions a product's developers attach behind every conversation, invisible to the user, that shapes how the model behaves before it ever sees a question.
- Prompt basketA prompt basket is the fixed set of questions a visibility tool asks engines on your behalf in order to measure how often you are named.
- Prompt volumePrompt volume is an estimate of how often real users ask an assistant a given question, the AI-search analogue of keyword search volume.
- Context windowThe context window is the amount of text a model can hold in view for a single answer, and once the input goes past that limit, whatever falls outside it is simply not seen.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.