How do you choose the questions you measure on?

The question is the full sentence your customer types when they want a decision. The keyword is a fragment of it, and an AI engine does not answer fragments: it answers a sentence carrying an intent, a condition and a place.

Google says its generative AI features may break a question into subtopics and search them all at once, which it calls query fan-out, so the condition and the city in your customer's question decide which pages get read, not the keyword alone.

The difference is practical. A keyword such as flowers Riyadh has no answer you can judge: an answer about what? A sentence such as which florist delivers the same day in Riyadh has an answer you can read, names you can count and sources you can open. So everything here is built on the question: measurement runs per question, the score is assembled from them, and a competitor is listed under the question it was cited on.

It is also why plans are sold by number of questions: every question is real work repeated on every engine on every cycle. Choosing questions is not a setup step you click past. It is the decision that sets the value of everything after it, and the first decision in optimising for AI answers (GEO).

How to read the result once you measure is set out in how to measure the success of optimising for AI answers.

A buying question precedes a decision to pay: it names a service, usually a city or a district, and usually a condition such as a price, a time slot or delivery. An informational question asks for understanding: what the difference between two things is, how to do something, what a term means. Each sector has its own conditions: a property buyer, for example, asks about the district, the price, the size and the distance to the metro, as set out in how a real-estate project leads AI answers.

Start with the buying ones. Your question balance is finite, and a buying question is the one that turns into a customer when your site is cited on it. Informational questions deserve a place afterwards: they build the engine's familiarity with you, and they are often easier to win.

• Buying. Which florist delivers the same day in Riyadh. The answer names shops, and you are one of them or you are not.
• Informational. How long do cut flowers last. The answer states a fact, and may cite whoever explained it best.
• How to split them. In the free trial, make 8 of your 10 questions buying questions and 2 informational, then widen as your plan grows.

Your customer does not write the way your brochure writes. They type a short sentence, in dialect, sometimes with a typo or a colloquial word. The engine understands it and answers it, and that answer is what we measure, so we ask in their phrasing rather than ours.

The words people type genuinely change the answer. A customer in Riyadh, one in Jeddah and one in Kuwait each type different words for the same service, and the engine searches with what was typed. So both the suggestions and the measurement follow each country of your site.

• Write a full sentence as it would be typed on a phone, not a heading and not a tag.
• Include the city or district when the decision is local, and leave them out when you ship everywhere.
• Include the condition that matters: a price under a figure, an appointment today, evening hours, an accepted insurance.
• Keep the colloquial word if that is the word people actually use, instead of polishing it into formal Arabic.
• Do not put your own business name in the question. Anyone searching your name already knows you, and this measurement is about the customer who does not.

A market is a country, a dialect, a currency and a buying habit. Riyadh and Jeddah are one market in language and two in districts and competitors; Saudi Arabia and the UAE are two markets in currency, competitors and the way people ask. Mixing two into one set gives you a number that describes neither.

The right shape: one question set per market. If your site serves more than one country, add each country to it with its own questions; how many countries a site holds follows your plan: 1 in the free trial and on Starter, 2 on Pro, 3 on Advanced and 5 on Business. If each market has a site of its own, add each site on its own. The free trial and Starter hold one site, Pro holds 3 sites, Advanced holds 5 sites, and on Business the sites are set to your team's needs. The question balance is shared across all your sites and their countries, never multiplied by them, so spend it where the decision matters most.

If you are in one market and several cities, make the city a condition inside the question rather than a site of its own. Ten questions covering two cities beat twenty near-identical ones.

Search Console is the record of the searches that actually reached your site from Google. Connect it and we suggest questions built on what people really typed rather than on what we assume. It is the most accurate place to start: your customers' own language, with dates attached.

The permission is read-only and you can withdraw it at any time. Without it everything still works: we suggest questions from your own pages, or you write them by hand.

When you read search data, look for the long, low-frequency sentences rather than the most frequent words. A sentence typed ten times a month with a clear condition in it is a real buying question; a word typed a thousand times is usually a generic label with no decision in it.

Two more free sources need no connection at all: the FAQ page on your site, if it was written from your actual phone calls, and the messages customers send you on WhatsApp or by email.

The sentence a real customer writes to you is the truest phrasing you will find, and the closest to what the next one will type into an engine. The other sources, and the tools that reveal your customers' questions and what each reveals, are in which tools reveal the questions your customers ask AI.

Once a question is written, resist it. The urge to polish the wording every week looks like diligence and is really an erasure of history: an edited question is a new question, and its measurements start today.

Test the wording once before saving by reading it aloud and asking whether your customer would type that sentence. If you hesitate, make it shorter. Short, plain sentences survive changes in the engines better than polished ones do.

The question balance is what you hold at once across all your sites, and you can delete one and add another whenever you like.

• Free trial. 10 questions, 1 site, ChatGPT and Gemini, for 7 days with two measurements, the second once you prove the site is yours.
• Starter. 40 questions, 1 site, adding Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with daily analysis.
• Pro. 100 questions, 3 sites, adding Google AI Mode, also with daily analysis. Advanced. 200 questions, 5 sites, on the same 5 engines.
• Business. Up to 8 engines chosen per client, updated daily, and its questions and sites set to your team's needs.

Your customers type these in Arabic, on a phone, colloquialisms and all. They are rendered in English only so you can read them; in your dashboard you enter the Arabic your customer writes.

• a florist that delivers the same day in Riyadh
• what is the best florist in Riyadh for fast delivery
• birthday bouquet under 300 riyals in Riyadh
• how much is a bouquet of damask roses in Riyadh
• flower delivery in Riyadh after 10 pm
• florist near Al Yasmin district
• graduation bouquet with balloons in Riyadh
• florist in Riyadh that delivers to hospitals
• corporate flower packages in Riyadh with a tax invoice
• florist in Riyadh that delivers during Eid

The same logic in another sector and another city, where the condition is usually an appointment, an insurance or a price, and the dialect is Hejazi rather than Najdi:

• how much does a dental cleaning cost in Jeddah
• best dental clinic in north Jeddah
• dental clinic open on Friday in Jeddah
• how much do clear aligners cost in Jeddah
• dental clinic in Jeddah that accepts medical insurance
• what is the best children's dentist in Jeddah
• same-day dental filling in Jeddah
• dental clinic near Al Shati district
• emergency dentist in Jeddah right now
• dental implants in Jeddah in instalments

The same logic in the UAE, where the question comes in Emirati dialect and the price in dirhams. As with the other lists, they are rendered in English so you can read them; in your dashboard you enter the Arabic your customer writes:

• mandi restaurant in Dubai that delivers to your home
• what is the best Arabic restaurant in Dubai Marina
• family restaurant in Dubai under 100 dirhams a person
• breakfast place in Jumeirah that opens early in the morning
• grill restaurant near Burj Khalifa
• restaurant in Dubai that takes group bookings
• best seafood restaurant in Sharjah
• healthy restaurant in Dubai that delivers meals to the office
• restaurant open after midnight in Dubai
• restaurant in Dubai with outdoor seating for families

The same logic in Egypt, where the question comes in Egyptian dialect and names the doctor and the district. As with the other lists, they are rendered in English so you can read them; in your dashboard you enter the Arabic your customer writes:

• best dentist in the Fifth Settlement
• orthodontist in Nasr City
• price of dental implants in Egypt
• how much is teeth whitening in Cairo
• who is the best root canal dentist in Maadi
• a good children's dentist in Heliopolis
• dental clinic open on Friday in Cairo
• dental clinic in Sheikh Zayed that accepts medical insurance
• emergency dentist open right now in Cairo
• dental crowns and bridges in instalments in Cairo

A question set is not a contract. Review it monthly or quarterly and drop whatever no longer serves a decision, but keep a fixed core: a question you change starts its history from zero, and without a core you will have no baseline to compare against in six months.

1. Keep a core of 3 to 5 questions you never touch. That core is your site's memory.
2. Drop the question nobody answers. If every engine records no answer month after month, it is not a market question.
3. Drop the question that never moves. Cited in every measurement for three months means you have won it, and its slot is worth more on a question you have not.
4. Rotate the seasonal ones. Ramadan, both Eids, National Day, White Friday and back-to-school questions come in a month before the season and leave after it. The calendar, with its dates, is in buying seasons in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.
5. Add what customers ask on the phone and on WhatsApp. The question your receptionist hears most often is the best new question you have.