Prompt volume
Prompt volume is an estimate of how often people ask AI platforms a question or use a phrase, the AI search version of keyword search volume.
Prompt volume is an estimate of how often people ask the AI platforms a given question, or use a given phrase, in a month. It's the AI search version of search volume for keywords: a way to tell the questions many people ask from the ones almost nobody does.
Why it's an estimate
Google publishes some data on what people search. The AI platforms don't publish what people ask them. So every prompt volume figure comes from somewhere else, usually a panel: a group of people who agree to share their activity, scaled up to the whole market.
That makes prompt volume useful for comparing questions with each other, and much less useful as an exact count. If one question shows ten times the volume of another, more people ask it. Whether it's 4,000 or 6,000 a month is beyond what any panel can tell you.
Be careful with the word, too. Some tools use "prompt volume" to mean how many times they asked a prompt themselves, which says nothing about demand. Check which one a number means before you compare it.
How to use it
Use prompt volume to choose what to track. If you have room for 50 prompts, spend them on the questions people ask most, and drop the ones nobody asks.
For example, if "coffee subscription gift" shows far more demand than "artisan coffee bean delivery service," the first one deserves a place in your prompts even if the second sounds more like your marketing.
Prompt volume in AnswerOrbit
We call it demand. The Demand tab in Topics shows how many conversations a month use a word or phrase on the AI platforms, how that changed over the last 12 months, and the related questions people ask. Each prompt also shows its demand as one of five levels, from Lowest to Highest.
Our demand is an estimate from a panel of conversations and searches on the six platforms, and it can be up to two weeks behind. See Topics and prompts.