Which tools reveal the questions your customers ask AI?

We mean the questions your customers type into ChatGPT, Gemini or Google when they look for a service like yours, so that the engine writes an answer that may cite your site, or may cite a competitor's instead of you. When a customer in Riyadh asks which dental clinic in Al Malqa is best, the engine replies with a few names, and you are either among them or not.

We do not mean a chatbot on your site that replies to your customers. That is a customer-service tool, and its log shows what a visitor asks once they have reached your site. Here the question is asked before the customer knows you, in an engine you do not own, and the answer is written from the whole web, not from your pages alone.

This guide is part of how to measure the success of optimising for AI answers: your customers' questions are the first thing you measure.

These questions come in two kinds, and each has its value:

• Questions that name you: the customer asks about your business by name, about your prices, your hours or your reputation. People who already know you ask them, and the engine mostly answers from your site and the sites that mention you.
• Questions that name the need: "Which is the best dental clinic in north Riyadh?" People who do not know you yet ask them, and this is where a new customer comes to you or goes to a competitor. They deserve most of your time.

Because chat engines do not share what people type into them with site owners. Neither ChatGPT nor Gemini gives you a report of the questions your business came up in, the way Search Console gives you the search queries in Google. So any list of questions you see in any tool was collected from another source, or written and then measured; it is not a log of what your customers actually typed.

That takes nothing away from measuring, but it changes the question you put to any tool: not "how many people asked about me?" but "where did these questions come from, and are they in my customers' words and dialect?" Be wary of any "ChatGPT search volume" figure whose source you do not know: it is an estimate, however much it looks like a measurement.

Six sources, most of which cost nothing and need no connection. Start with them before any tool, because they give you your customers' words as they write them:

No single tool reveals everything. Here are six kinds of tool, and what each one reveals and does not:

• Google's Search Console: the real search queries that brought people to your site, with their dates. It does not reveal what was asked in chat engines.
• Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report: a sample of the search phrases Copilot and Bing's AI summaries used to reach your pages, and which pages were cited. It is the closest any engine comes today to the questions behind the answers, but it covers Bing alone.
• Keyword tools in SEO: what is searched for in Google and estimates of how often. Useful for choosing a topic, but they give you keywords rather than sentences, and their figures are about search, not answers.
• Google Trends: interest in a topic in your country and its seasons, rising and falling, not the questions themselves.
• The chatbot on your site: what your visitors ask once they arrive, not what they asked before, nor who answered them.
• A tool that measures AI answers: it puts your customers' questions to the engines and says, for each answer, whether your site was cited and who was cited instead of you. Only this kind reveals which questions the engine answers with your site and which with someone else's.

That is the question gap: questions in which the engine cites your competitors and which you have not added to your list yet. It is like the keyword gap in SEO, but with the whole question as it is put to the engine. We find it for every site, so you know what your competitor wins outside your questions, and you add what matters to you in one step, so your site is measured on it from the next measurement.

In the free trial you see how many such questions there are, with 3 of them in full; on the paid plans you see them all. How to read the page of the competitor who leads them, and why the engine chose it, is in how to know which competitor ChatGPT recommends instead of you.

Take a dental clinic in north Riyadh. These are questions you might find in each source, written the way patients write them:

• From Search Console: "how much is teeth whitening in Riyadh", "dental clinic open on Saturday".
• From the clinic's WhatsApp: "do you accept insurance?", "is there an appointment today after the afternoon prayer?".
• From the receptionist: "how much do clear aligners cost?", "can I pay in instalments?".
• From the engine itself: "which is the best children's dental clinic in north Riyadh?".
• From the question gap: "dental clinic in Al Malqa that accepts insurance", led by a competitor you were not tracking.

Choose from your list the buying questions that come before the decision to pay, in your customers' words and dialect, one per service and city, and start with ten in one market. How to choose and write them, with examples from Riyadh, Jeddah and Dubai, is in how to choose the questions you measure.

A question you know but do not measure is information; a question you measure is a decision. After the measurement, each question is in one of three states:

• You are cited: keep the page that won the question as it is, and track who comes close to it.
• A competitor leads instead of you: put their page beside yours and write down what theirs says and yours does not. That is what the competitor comparison page shows.
• Nobody is cited: a question nobody has won yet, and a clear page that answers it may take it.

Six mistakes that give you a long list that tells you nothing:

• Looking for a chatbot when what you want is to know what is asked about you in ChatGPT.
• Collecting keywords instead of whole sentences. The engine answers a question, not a word.
• Writing the questions in your brochure's language rather than your customer's dialect.
• Keeping only the questions that name you, so you know what is said about you but not who is taking your new customers.
• Believing a "ChatGPT search volume" figure whose source you do not know.
• Collecting a hundred questions and measuring none of them.

Nobody can give you a full record of what people type into ChatGPT or Gemini about your business, or how many asked. Whoever promises that is giving you an estimate, not a record.

What we can do is measure the questions your customers ask in their own words and dialect, tell you on each engine who was cited, and search for what your competitors lead that you do not track. The rest of your questions about measurement and data are answered in the FAQ about Tasadr.