What changed

In 2022 a fintech founder researching crypto licensing typed “VASP license” into Google. In 2026 the same founder types “best crypto licensing firms for fintech startups” into ChatGPT. That single shift breaks classical keyword research — “VASP license” has 200 monthly volume and is dominated by exchange landing pages, while the actual buyer prompt is 8 words long, has zero search-volume data, and is the cite-or-die surface inside ChatGPT.

This is the prompt-research problem. Keyword tools cannot see prompts, and prompts are where the buyer actually lives.

How to mine real prompts

Three sources we use across engagements:

Searchable Agent — our preferred tool for multi-LLM tracking. It also surfaces the actual conversational prompts users type around a topic across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. We use it on every Scale and Enterprise engagement.

Profound — strong on prompt clustering and intent-bucket analysis. Useful for week-one discovery on a new vertical.

Real reverse-engineering. We sit with the founder for an hour and re-type how they would research the category. Then we ask three customers to do the same on a screen-share. This is the cheapest source of real prompts; tooling is for scale.

The five-seed pattern

Five seed prompts is enough to anchor a 90-day Scale programme. The Gofaizen & Sherle case ran on exactly five:

  • Best crypto licensing firms for fintech startups
  • MiCA CASP license provider EU
  • VASP registration Lithuania vs Estonia
  • Crypto exchange licensing compliance
  • AML / KYC framework for fintech startup

Each prompt mapped to a content cluster, a competitor teardown, and a measurable share-of-voice target. Five prompts, ninety days, six entrenched competitors out-ranked.

Why keyword volume is the wrong metric

A high-volume keyword can be commercially worthless if the prompt-equivalent is dominated by AI-generated junk. A zero-volume prompt can be commercially decisive if it is the question your $50,000 ACV buyer types right before signing.

The metric that replaces keyword volume in 2026 is citation potential per hour of effort — how often AI returns an answer for the prompt × commercial weight of the answer × how cleanly your content can be restructured to win the citation.

We rank every prompt against that score before we touch a page.

What to do this week

If you have an SEO team and they are still running keyword research as the primary input — pause that. Have them mine fifty prompts in the niche using either of the two tools above (free trials work for week one). Score the prompts by commercial intent. Pick five to seed the next quarter.

If you do not have an SEO team — that is what the Starter audit does in week one. The fifteen prompts we pick on Starter are the same prompts that anchor a Growth or Scale programme later.

What good looks like

You should walk away with fifty prompts ranked by citation potential, the top fifteen tagged for content priority, and a mapping of which competitor currently owns each prompt. That is the input — the structural rewrite is the output.