METHOD / ENTRY 16
The list of real customer questions that Bay Area AEO runs for each client every month, and how its published sample questions show the list being built.
A prompt panel is the fixed set of questions a business's measurement runs on. Bay Area AEO describes it as a list of the real questions the business's customers ask AI, run across every major platform each month. Its example is "best family dentist in San Mateo." The panel is the part of the method that makes the measurement belong to one business: two dentists in the same city can have different panels because they want different patients.
The agency's 40 niche pages each carry sample questions, and together they show what a good panel entry looks like. Most combine a service with a place and one or more conditions. The conditions are what make the question hard to answer and what make the answer worth winning.
| Industry | Sample question |
|---|---|
| Food and drink | Where should I take my parents for dinner in Walnut Creek? Somewhere quiet with good wine. |
| Health and wellness | I need a chiropractor in Fremont for lower back pain. Someone who doesn't just crack and send you home. |
| Professional services | I need a CPA in San Jose who works with startup founders and handles equity compensation. |
| Home services | Who should I call to replace my gas furnace with a heat pump in Concord? I want someone who handles the rebates. |
None of these is a keyword. Each is a sentence a person would say to a phone, and each carries a condition (quiet with good wine, more than a quick adjustment, equity compensation, the rebates) that only a business with the right published detail can satisfy.
Reading the published questions, four parts recur. The service: dentist, CPA, heat pump. The place: a city, often a neighborhood such as Willow Glen, Temescal or the Mission. The constraint: an insurer such as Delta Dental or Blue Shield, a language such as Hindi, a timing need such as "open on Sunday" or "can come today." And the occasion or reason: a birthday dinner for six, a first date, a home sale, rats in the attic. A panel built from a client's real customers will mix these the way those customers do.
Each trade has its own vocabulary, and the panel keeps it. A solar question mentions NEM 3.0 and a battery. A roofing question asks for fire-resistant materials. An insurance question mentions a wildfire area. A plumbing question mentions a sewer line inspection. Those words are what customers type, and they point straight at the niche signals the agency builds: a solar company's net billing explanation, a roofer's fire ratings, an agency's FAIR Plan guidance.
The panel is run every month, and its value comes from staying the same. When this month's answers are compared with last month's, the only difference should be time and the work done in between. A fixed panel turns twelve monthly runs into a series that an owner can read as progress. New questions can be added as a business expands to a new location or service, and the original questions keep running beside them.
The city entries in this journal print each city's published sample questions; the San Jose entry has the longest list. The query fan-out entry shows what an assistant does with one of these questions once it is asked, and the report fields entry shows what is recorded about each answer.