Content strategist looking to improve your AI content strategy? What to focus on
What we tell content strategists to focus on for an AI content strategy: plan by prompt, fix crawler access, close answer gaps, refresh first and measure visits.
Content strategists tend to arrive at us with a good instinct and no visibility. They have been told to improve the "AI content strategy," and the brief is vague. Here is what we say we would focus on, based on running content programs on Promptwatch.
First, a definition. We mean making content that gets found, quoted and recommended inside AI answers, not just producing content faster with AI.
Start from prompts
Search planning starts with keywords. AI search planning starts with prompts: longer, more specific, and often split by the engine into sub-searches before it answers. We build the list from existing demand. Prompt Explorer suggests prompts from Search Console, ranking keywords, People Also Ask or any page. We add tags, topics and intent, and personas, including stacked personas, so answers can be compared by buyer type.
Query fan-outs per model are the most underrated input. They show what an engine searches for behind a prompt, which is close to a brief handed to us by the engine.
Take a baseline
Before writing, we capture Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Sentiment and Position in Answer. Monitors run daily per model, country and language. Without a before picture the quarterly review becomes an argument.
Rule out access problems
This is the part strategists skip, and it costs time later. If AI crawlers cannot fetch the pages, new content does nothing. Agent Analytics shows IP-verified visits from agents like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, with failure explanations. Crawler logs start on Professional ($245/mo), not Essential. A weekly Site Health audit adds 21 checks and a change log. We hand findings to a developer with the evidence attached.
Work from the answer gap
For each priority prompt, we ask who is cited and what they have that we lack. Content gap analysis scores coverage. Monks, an agency, uses the Answer Gap Report and Visibility Score for its client roadmaps, and we run the same logic. Gaps become the roadmap.
Refresh before creating
Writers' time is the scarce thing. Content Refresh suggests diff-style updates to existing pages, and Citation Trends shows each page's citation rate over time along with first cited, ramp-up days, peak rate and decay half-life. A page whose citations are fading is a better bet than a new article on a topic you already cover. Only after that do we commission new pages for the gaps that remain.
Plan for off-site
Engines quote third parties, so content strategy includes placements. Citation analytics shows page and domain level citations, offsite mentions where the brand is named without a link, and Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn reports. We turn that into a target list for PR and community people.
Use evidence to choose formats
We avoid blanket rules about what format works. Citation Trends classifies every citation by content type and source type, so we can see what is actually cited for a client's topics. Our default is to build content around first-hand material: the client's own data, product expertise and named experts. We then check the citations to see whether it holds up for that topic.
Make production safe
The Knowledge Base (Professional and up) keeps brand facts in one place. Author profiles support attribution. The Content Agent, on Business and Enterprise plans, plans, writes and publishes against gaps on a schedule, with a publishing calendar, monthly budget and a review inbox. We keep the inbox on. Publishing goes to WordPress, Webflow or Framer. One thing to know: agency plans do not include AEO articles, the knowledge base or the automated Content Agent.
Crisp is a published example of production at pace. It reported scaling to 5 to 10 articles a day, and AI-referred traffic converting at twice the rate of traditional channels. That is Crisp's result, not an expectation.
Report on outcomes
Visitor analytics counts AI-referred visits and conversions through a script, a GTM template or the WordPress plugin. TreeHouse, the group behind Pararius and Huurwoningen.nl, reported AI search reaching about 25% of organic conversions, 99% of it from ChatGPT, after fixing crawler access and automating weekly reporting. We use cases like that to explain why measurement is worth setting up, not to promise a number.
The weekly rhythm
- Weekly: the Action Board, with a Discovery agent suggesting up to five evidence-backed actions per run.
- Monthly: citation review by content type, refresh picks, crawler errors.
- Quarterly: reset the prompt set.
What we are careful about
Tracked prompts are a sample, and answers vary between runs. No tool guarantees a recommendation. And for Google's AI features, read the current Search Central documentation directly. What the workflow gives a content strategist is evidence for priorities, and a way to show whether the work moved anything.