Prompt intents
The five intent categories, what each one reveals, and how many prompts to run in each.
Every prompt in Rivarise carries an intent label: Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Comparison, Brand Specific or Competitor. The label is for your analysis and grouping; it does not change how the question is asked. Its value is that it forces you to cover the whole buying journey instead of tracking five versions of the same question.
The five intents
| Intent | Shape of the question | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Problem Aware | "How do I stop my team missing deadlines?" | Whether engines route this person to your category at all, and which category they choose. |
| Solution Aware | "Best project management software for agencies" | The shortlist. Highest commercial intent and usually the first place to look. |
| Comparison | "Rivarise vs Profound vs Peec AI" | Whose framing the engine repeats, and which attributes it treats as decisive. |
| Brand Specific | "Is Rivarise any good?" | Sentiment, and stale facts such as old pricing or removed features. |
| Competitor | "Alternatives to Profound" | Displacement opportunities, aimed at people already looking to switch. |
Problem Aware
The buyer describes a pain and has not chosen a category. These are the earliest and least contested entry points, and the ones most teams never track.
What to watch for: the engine picks a category on the buyer's behalf. If it answers a scheduling complaint with "you need a project management tool" and you sell time tracking, you have lost before any product is named. That is a positioning finding, not a content gap, and no amount of comparison pages fixes it.
Solution Aware
The buyer knows the category and wants the shortlist. This is where revenue concentrates, and where the answer is usually three or four named products.
The critical detail is the constraint. "Best CRM" is nearly useless as a tracked prompt: it is too broad, the answer is generic, and nobody buys from it. "Best CRM for a two-person real estate team under $50 a month" is the question that actually gets typed and the one you can realistically win. Track the constrained versions.
Comparison
Direct head-to-head questions. The engine almost always repeats the framing of whoever published the most authoritative comparison content, and that is frequently your competitor's own page or a review site.
Reading the stored answer here is unusually productive, because it tells you which attributes the engine believes are decisive. If it consistently compares on price and integrations while you compete on support quality, your positioning has not reached the sources engines read.
Brand Specific
Questions naming only you. These are the least useful for discovering new demand, because an engine asked about you will nearly always mention you. Their value is different: they surface what the engines believe about you.
This is where stale facts show up: pricing you changed a year ago, a feature you removed, a market you exited, or a single unflattering review being treated as representative. Track two or three, no more.
Competitor
"Alternatives to X" and "X competitors". The buyer is already dissatisfied with a named product, which makes these the cheapest displacement opportunities available.
Track one per major rival. If you are absent from the alternatives list for a competitor you regularly beat in deals, that is a specific, fixable content gap rather than a vague awareness problem.
A balanced set
For a single brand tracking 20 prompts, a reasonable distribution:
| Intent | Prompts | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Solution Aware | 7 | Where the money is. Vary the constraint across them. |
| Competitor | 4 | One per rival you genuinely lose to. |
| Comparison | 4 | Your name against each major rival. |
| Problem Aware | 3 | Category-level entry points. |
| Brand Specific | 2 | Enough to catch stale claims and sentiment. |
Common mistakes
- Tracking only brand prompts. Produces a flattering, useless dashboard. You will score high and learn nothing.
- Tracking unconstrained category questions. "Best CRM" returns the same four incumbents forever and gives you nothing to act on.
- Skipping Problem Aware. It is the only intent that tells you whether engines put you in the right category at all.
- Duplicating one question five ways. Slight rewordings consume quota and produce correlated results that look like corroboration but are not.
Next
Read The PPS score to see how these results roll into a single number.