Questions people ask ChatGPT about your industry
·7 min read
Nobody outside OpenAI can see the questions people ask ChatGPT, so every list of ChatGPT questions for your industry is built from proxies. The useful proxies are the questions people search on Google, People Also Ask boxes, third-party datasets of the questions AI Overviews and ChatGPT answer, your own sales and support inbox, Reddit and forums, and the question-shaped queries in Search Console. Collect them, sort them by buyer stage, check which ones AI answers already cover and which sites they cite, then write pages for the gaps.
Can you see the questions people ask ChatGPT?
No. ChatGPT has no Search Console or query report, and OpenAI publishes no data on what people ask about a given topic. Even OpenAI's own researchers didn't read prompts when they studied usage. Their 2025 paper says no member of the team ever saw the content of a user message, because an automated classifier labeled the sample.
So be skeptical of any number labeled "ChatGPT prompt volume". Whoever shows it has estimated it from other data, such as Google search demand, a panel of users or prompts the vendor ran itself. An estimate can still rank questions against each other. It can't tell you that 3,000 people asked ChatGPT a specific question last month.
You don't need it. Deciding what to write takes the right questions in roughly the right order, and proxies get you there.
What do people ask ChatGPT?
People mostly ask ChatGPT for advice and for information, the two things a good web page can supply. How People Use ChatGPT, an NBER working paper from September 2025 by OpenAI researchers and Harvard economist David Deming, classified a sample of about a million messages from logged-in consumer ChatGPT users, sent between May 2024 and June 2025.
- Practical guidance stayed at roughly 29% of messages. It covers how-to advice, tutoring and creative ideas.
- Seeking information grew from 14% of messages in July 2024 to 24% a year later. It covers people, products, current events and recipes, and the authors say it appears to be a very close substitute for web search.
- Writing fell from 36% to 24% over the same year.
Together those three topics account for about 77% of consumer use.
The paper draws a line between the first two that matters for content. Seeking information asks for a fact that should be the same for everyone, like Boston Marathon qualifying times by age and gender. Practical guidance asks for something tailored, like a training plan for one runner's goals and fitness. ChatGPT builds the tailored answer out of general facts. A page that states those facts plainly, with numbers, limits, prices and steps, can feed both kinds of answer.
How ChatGPT prompts differ from search queries
A ChatGPT prompt carries the context that a search query leaves out. Someone shopping for software types "dental scheduling software" into Google. In ChatGPT the same person writes something closer to this:
I run a two-chair dental practice and most of our no-shows ignore text reminders. Which scheduling software can phone patients instead, and what does it cost per month?
That prompt names the size of the business, the real problem and the decision to be made. Keyword data strips all of it out. The keyword tells you the topic. The prompt tells you the question your page has to answer.
When ChatGPT searches the web, it rewrites a prompt like that into one or more shorter queries and sends them to search providers, according to OpenAI's help article on ChatGPT search. Search-style phrasing still decides which pages get retrieved, which is what query fan-out is about. The full prompt decides what the final answer has to say.
That is why your own customers are the best source for ChatGPT prompts research. Sales call notes, demo request forms, support tickets and live chat logs are written in the same long, situational way people type into ChatGPT. Pull the last 50 and copy out every question word for word, context included.
How to find questions for AEO without prompt data
Use several proxies and trust the questions that turn up in more than one, because each source sees a different slice.
| Source | What it gives you | Blind spot |
|---|---|---|
| Google search questions | Short phrasings from autocomplete and keyword tools | No context about who is asking |
| People Also Ask | Questions Google ties to your topic, more as you expand them | No volumes, and only what Google picks |
| AI answer datasets | Questions tracked in AI Overviews or ChatGPT, with answers and sources | A sample of popular questions, not a log |
| Sales and support | Whole situations in your buyers' words | Only people who already found you |
| Reddit and forums | Questions people ask each other, with follow-ups in replies | Skews toward enthusiasts and complaints |
| Search Console | Question queries your pages already appear for | Misses every question you don't rank for yet |
Search Console's Performance report accepts a query filter written as an RE2 regular expression. This one keeps the queries that open with a question word:
^(who|what|when|where|why|how|which|is|are|can|does|do|should)\sOur Question Finder collects the questions Google autocomplete shows for a topic and checks which ones a page already answers. Our guide to AnswerThePublic alternatives walks through the other sources.
Group the questions by buyer stage
Sort each question by the stage of the purchase it belongs to, because AI answers treat the stages differently and your plan should too. Here is the dental example:
| Stage | Example question | Typical AI answer |
|---|---|---|
| Problem | Why do dental patients miss appointments? | Causes, citing health and industry sites |
| Solution | How can a small practice cut no-shows? | A list of methods, sometimes with tools named |
| Comparison | What's the best scheduling software for a two-chair practice? | Named brands, citing review sites and comparison posts |
| Decision | Does Acme Schedule work with our practice management system? | The vendor's own docs and pricing page |
| Use | How do I set up recall reminders in Acme Schedule? | Help docs |
Spend your first pages on comparison and decision questions. Those are the answers that name brands, and a question with no page from you hands the mention to a competitor. Problem questions bring reach but rarely a brand mention. Use questions keep customers, and your help docs probably answer most of them already.
Check which questions AI answer engines already cover
For each comparison and decision question, find out whether an AI answer exists, whether it names you and what it cites. Ask it in ChatGPT with search on, in Perplexity and in Gemini, and search it on Google to see whether an AI Overview appears. Log four columns per question:
- Whether an AI answer appears at all.
- Whether it names your brand, and in what position.
- The sources it cites.
- The page on your site that should answer it, or "none".
The sources column tells you what kind of page wins. If three competitor comparison pages are cited, you need a comparison page. If Reddit threads and review sites are cited, you also need to be part of those discussions. A vague answer that cites nothing useful marks an open question, the easiest win on the list.
One answer is a sample. ChatGPT gives different people different answers, so ask each question a few times on different days before you mark it covered or missing. AI Answer Visibility asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini your question with web search on and reports whether each answer names or cites your brand, and which brands it names instead.
Write pages that answer the gaps
Write one page, or one section of an existing page, for each gap. Start with the comparison and decision questions where competitors get cited and you don't. Keep each answer quotable:
- Use the buyer's question as the heading, in their words.
- Answer it in the first sentence, then add the detail.
- Give the specifics a tailored answer needs, such as price, limits, integrations, setup time and who the product doesn't suit.
- Cover one question per section, so the passage still makes sense when it's quoted alone.
Then make sure ChatGPT can reach the page. ChatGPT search finds pages through OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI's crawler docs say sites that opt out of it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. Our guide on how to get cited by ChatGPT has the robots.txt rule. Check again a few weeks after you publish, since AI answers are slow to pick up new pages.
Find the questions AI answers about your topic
AI Question Finder takes a topic, or a website to see the questions whose answers cite it. Choose Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT, and one of 20 countries or all countries together. It returns the 25 most searched questions the data provider tracks, each with estimated monthly searches, the start of the answer, the day it was last seen and its first five sources. For a website it shows where that site's page sits among those sources, and both modes list the sites cited across the most questions, with the share of questions each appears in.
The questions come from a third-party dataset of AI answers, not from OpenAI's logs, so treat them as one more proxy. The provider tracks the questions people ask most, and far fewer for ChatGPT than for AI Overviews. Run both platforms, then run a competitor's domain to see what it gets quoted for. Each run costs 160 credits.