Searchable launches Prompt Universe: your AI visibility score may cover 2% of what buyers actually ask
AI visibility platform Searchable launched Prompt Universe today — a feature that maps the entire range of questions buyers ask AI about a brand, often tens or hundreds of thousands of them, before narrowing down to the set worth tracking. It's a direct challenge to the AEO industry's habit of scoring visibility against a few hundred guessed prompts.
Answer engine optimization has a "prompt problem," according to Searchable — the AI visibility platform founded in London and New York in late 2025 by Chris Donnelly, Sam Hogan and Arya Nagabhyru. Brands report strong AI visibility scores while tracking a limited, highly synthetic set of prompts. Based on Searchable's experience, businesses that move from other providers can find themselves tracking as little as 2 percent of their relevant prompt coverage — and for many larger businesses, coverage runs under 0.3 percent.
"AEO has a prompt problem, which Searchable's Prompt Universe is now solving," said Donnelly, the company's CEO and co-founder, in the launch announcement. "If you're only seeing a small segment of what customers ask about your business's key revenue drivers, how confident can you be in your AI visibility score, and in the optimization decisions you make from it?"
Map first, track second#
Prompt Universe inverts the usual AEO workflow. Instead of starting from "what prompts should we track?", it builds the complete map of what buyers could ask AI about a brand, its products, its competitors, its category and its buying situations — then filters that map down to the prompts that are worth monitoring. "Many brands track a few hundred prompts they guessed," Donnelly said. "Prompt Universe maps the questions buyers could ask AI about your business, often in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Then we narrow that down to the set worth tracking."
The feature draws on the brand's own website, the terminology buyers use within its category, the online platforms where those buyers search, and the follow-up searches AI engines perform when answering questions in that market — covering the whole buying journey from initial research to product comparisons and purchase decisions. The resulting questions are categorized by product, audience, competitor, location and situation, giving brands a view of where their coverage has gaps.
115,000 prompts for one airline#
To show what a prompt universe looks like in practice, Searchable ran the tool across a selection of multi-billion-dollar brands, including a major international airline. For the airline, the analysis generated more than 115,000 possible prompt permutations from 11 topics and 436 subtopics, multiplied by variables including buyer demographics, routes and fare types. After filtering for questions buyers would realistically ask about the airline, more than 33,000 prompts remained for consideration.
Searchable is explicit that this is not a call to track everything. Prompt Universe is not meant to make brands monitor more prompts — it is meant to change the starting point: identify the gaps in an existing prompt set and find which prompts give the most representative, commercially relevant view. "Every prompt has to earn its place in AI visibility tracking," said Ivan Slobodin, Searchable's founding AEO product lead. "The goal is to give brands a complete view of the opportunity first, then help them build a focused tracking plan around what matters most to the business."
Why it matters#
AEO is having its early-SEO moment. As AI answers increasingly replace the link lists of classic search, brands are spending on visibility scores the way they once spent on keyword rankings — and the tooling industry measuring that visibility is still young, with its standards unsettled. Searchable's bet is that the first step most vendors skipped is the map itself: knowing what the prompt landscape actually looks like before declaring a score. If the company is right that large brands are tracking a fraction of a percent of relevant coverage, the "visibility" market has a measurement problem hiding inside a growth story.
Prompt Universe is currently being rolled out to existing Searchable customers. Businesses that don't already work with Searchable can apply to explore their own version at searchable.com/prompt-universe. The numbers in the announcement come from Searchable's own analyses — independent verification of the 2-percent claim will depend on whether the tool gets into enough hands to be tested against rival platforms.