Understanding personas

Understand how different audiences influence the way AI platforms present your brand.

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What are Personas?

Personas represent the audiences behind your tracked questions. Different audiences have different goals, requirements, concerns, and levels of expertise. As a result, they may ask different questions and receive different brand recommendations from AI platforms. Examples of personas include:

• Marketing Manager
• SEO Agency Data Lead
• Market Research Analyst
• Product Manager
• Backend Developer
• Small-business owner

Each prompt in Palagus belongs to one persona. This allows you to compare how your brand performs from different audience perspectives.

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Why Personas matter

An overall Visibility score can hide important differences between audiences. For example:

Persona	Visibility
SEO Agency Data Lead	29.6%
Backend Developer	26.4%
Market Research Analyst	3.9%

This indicates that the brand appears more frequently for some personas than for others. Persona analysis helps you understand:

• Which audiences frequently encounter your brand
• Which audiences receive competitor recommendations instead
• Which requirements influence brand visibility
• How Position and Sentiment differ between audiences
• Where your content or positioning may need improvement

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The Personas overview

Open Personas from the project navigation to view all personas in the current project. The overview displays:

• Persona: The name of the audience
• Visibility: The aggregated Visibility of the prompts assigned to the persona
• Prompts: The number of prompts assigned to the persona
• Actions: Available options for managing the persona

Use the filters at the top of the page to analyze persona performance by:

• Date range
• AI model
• Country

You can also search for a specific persona, sort the table, change the number of displayed results, or export the current data.

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The default persona

Every project includes a General persona marked as Default. The default persona provides a place for prompts that are not associated with a more specific audience. For more meaningful persona comparisons, create dedicated personas for the audiences whose perspectives you want to analyze.

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Create a persona manually

Select Add Persona and open the Add tab. The modal let’s you select between the tabs “Add” and “Generate”. Select the “Add” tab if you want to create your persona manually: Persona: Give the persona a clear and recognizable name. Use a name that describes the relevant audience rather than a fictional person’s name. Persona Description: Describe the audience and the context in which questions are asked. A useful description can include:

• Role or profession
• Goals
• Responsibilities
• Relevant experience
• Important requirements
• Common challenges
• Buying considerations
• Industry or location, when relevant

The description should contain enough context to distinguish the persona from other audiences without becoming unnecessarily detailed. Select the “Generate” tab if you want to get inspired by AI created personas: Describe the audience you want to understand. You can include details such as:

• Profession
• Industry
• Goals
• Interests
• Challenges
• Location
• Buying behavior
• Relevant requirements

Palagus uses this context to identify relevant audience segments and create suitable personas. Review generated personas before using them to ensure that they represent genuinely different perspectives. We would not recommend to use them directly. We want to give you an inspiration. You know your personas at best.

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Assign prompts to Personas

Each prompt belongs to one persona. Assign a prompt according to the audience perspective represented by the question.

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Analyze a Persona

Select a persona from the overview to open its detail page. The detail page contains:

• The persona name
• The persona description
• The selected date, model, and country filters
• A performance heatmap
• The prompts associated with the persona

The description provides the context needed to understand why the persona asks particular questions and prioritizes specific requirements.

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Visibility Heatmap

The Persona detail page includes a heatmap that compares brands across the prompts assigned to the persona. Each row represents a topic. Each column represents your brand or a tracked competitor. You can switch between:

• Visibility
• Position
• Sentiment

Darker or stronger cell colors indicate higher values for the selected metric. The numerical value inside each cell provides the exact result. Use the heatmap to identify:

• Prompts where your brand performs strongly
• Prompts where competitors lead
• Requirements strongly associated with particular brands
• Differences in Position or Sentiment
• Areas that require closer investigation

Open or review the underlying AI responses before drawing conclusions from an individual cell. When clicking on one cell, a sheet opens where all associated responses are listed so that they can be inspected.

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Changes

Enable Changes to focus on how persona-level results have developed across the selected comparison period. Use this view to identify where brand performance has improved, declined, or remained stable for the selected persona and metric. Always check the active date, model, and country filters when comparing changes.

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Best practices

• Create personas that represent genuinely different perspectives.
• Focus on goals, requirements, and decision criteria.
• Avoid creating several personas that would ask identical questions.
• Use clear role-based names.
• Keep descriptions specific but concise.
• Assign every prompt to the audience whose perspective it represents.
• Compare both aggregate persona results and individual prompts.
• Review the underlying AI responses when a result is unexpected.
• Start with a small number of meaningful personas and expand when necessary.

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Personas vs. Topics

Personas and topics answer different questions: Persona: Who is asking? Topic:   What is the question about? Prompt:  What is being asked?

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Frequently asked questions

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How detailed should a persona be?

Include enough information to explain the audience’s goals, requirements, and decision context. Avoid details that do not influence the questions or expected answers.

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Should I create personas for every customer type?

Only when the audiences have meaningfully different questions, priorities, or evaluation criteria.

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Can multiple personas cover the same topic?

Yes. Different personas can ask about the same topic from different perspectives.

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Why does Visibility differ between personas?

Each persona has its own assigned prompts. Differences can result from the questions, requirements, AI models, countries, or competitors associated with those prompts.

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What is the General persona?

General is the default persona for prompts that are not assigned to a more specific audience.

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Should I use generated personas without reviewing them?

Review generated personas before using them. Keep personas that represent relevant and distinct audience perspectives, and avoid unnecessary overlap.

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Next

• Learn about Topics
• Learn how to Create effective prompts
• Understand Visibility
• Understand Position
• Understand Sentiment