A prompt is the instruction or question you give an AI. Everything you type to get a response is a prompt — from a single quick question to several paragraphs of careful instructions. The clearer and more specific it is, the better the result: a vague prompt gets a vague answer.
"Prompt" is one of the most-used words in AI, and its meaning is genuinely simple: it's just whatever you type in to get the AI to respond. There's no special format required — a one-word question and a five-paragraph brief are both prompts.
What separates a weak prompt from a strong one isn't length, it's clarity. A prompt that gives the AI context, a clear task and a sense of the format you want will reliably produce a more useful result than a short, vague one — because the AI can only work with the information you actually give it.
It's worth distinguishing "a prompt" from two related ideas on this site: prompt engineering is the skill of writing prompts well, and our step-by-step guide walks through exactly how to do that. This page is just about the term itself.
Example"Fix this email" is a prompt. So is "Rewrite this quote email to be friendlier and under 120 words, keeping the price and both dates." Both are prompts — but only the second gives the AI enough to work with reliably.
If you're getting disappointing AI results, the prompt is the first place to look. See our guide on how to write an AI prompt for the specific method.
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