Getting Started
A first-week playbook for new SurfacedBy accounts.
This guide is for new accounts. The goal is to get you from "I just signed up" to "I have data I can act on" within the first week or so.
Day 1: set up
Follow the Quickstart to add your primary domain, confirm your brand and competitors, and choose your Prompts. Your first Full Check runs in the background and usually finishes within a few minutes.
Pick a plan that covers the platforms you care about. Starter covers ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. If Google AI Mode visibility matters, Professional is the minimum plan. Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek are add-ons you can buy on any paid plan.
Days 1 to 2: read the first numbers
When the first Full Check finishes, open the domain's dashboard. Focus on three things:
- Headline numbers - Visibility Score, Brand Coverage, and AI Mentions on the Overview page. There is no history yet, so note the starting values.
- Per-platform breakdown - which AI platforms mention you often and which rarely do, on AI Visibility.
- Cited pages - which of your pages AI platforms cite, on Citations & Sources > Your pages.
Do not act on single numbers yet. One check is a starting point, not a trend.
Days 2 to 7: Daily Checks
A Daily Check runs every day except the day a Full Check is due. It reviews a focused set of your Prompts, so it shows recent movement quickly but does not cover everything the Full Check does. Use it to spot early changes, not to draw conclusions.
After the second Full Check
The Full Check runs weekly. Once you have two Full Checks to compare, you can start drawing real conclusions:
- Did Brand Coverage move? Early on, flat is normal.
- Are the same pages being cited consistently, or is the list volatile? Consistency means AI platforms have settled on those pages as a source for those topics.
- Are competitors gaining on you on specific Prompts?
Pick one or two gaps to work on; the Opportunities page ranks them for you. Do not try to fix everything at once: changes to your site take time to show up in AI answers, and the Full Check confirms them on a weekly cadence.
Ongoing
Choose which alerts you receive, and how sensitive they are, from Settings > Notifications (Visibility Score alerts, Brand Coverage alerts, Competitor alerts, and more), so you do not have to check the dashboard every day. Workspace admins can also send alerts to their own systems by subscribing a webhook endpoint to the alert.triggered event from Settings > Integrations > Webhooks. See Webhooks.