Getting started with Surfaced

The short version

Sign up, paste in your website URL, and Surfaced takes it from there. We analyse your site, generate the prompts your customers are actually asking AI engines, run them across six major LLMs, and present a dashboard showing exactly where your brand is visible and where it isn’t. You don’t need a keyword list, a content audit, or a SEO plan to get started. Just the URL.

This guide walks through what to expect in your first session, what the dashboard is telling you, and how to turn the first gap you find into a published article.

What you need

One thing:

• Your website URL. That’s it. Everything else — prompt generation, LLM coverage, the first tracking run — happens automatically.

No credit card for the free tier. No integrations to configure. No code to paste anywhere. No spreadsheet of keywords to prepare.

What happens when you sign up

1. Sign up

Create an account with your email. You’ll get a magic link — click it and you’re in. No passwords to remember, no SSO to configure, no integrations to install.

2. Enter your company name and website

Onboarding opens on a single form. Type your company name and paste your website URL. Surfaced creates your workspace automatically from those two inputs. If a colleague has already set up the workspace you can claim it here; otherwise you continue into a fresh one.

3. Let Surfaced analyse your site

The next screen shows “Analysing your site”. Under the hood we’re crawling your pages, reading your positioning, identifying your category and figuring out which competitors your customers are likely comparing you to. This takes a minute or two. You don’t need to do anything — if you close the tab, the progress persists and resumes when you come back.

4. Approve the auto-generated prompts

When analysis finishes, Surfaced shows a list of generated prompts — the real questions your buyers would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity when shortlisting a solution in your space. Tick the ones you want tracked, untick anything off-target, edit wording if you want. Your plan sets the upper limit (free starts at a handful; Pro and Business scale into the hundreds).

5. Launch the first tracking run

Click to kick off the first run. Surfaced queries every selected prompt across six engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok — and records every mention, sentiment and citation. You can close the tab. The dashboard will be ready within 1–2 minutes.

What you’ll see on the dashboard

Four hero metrics at the top of /app, each with a trend line once you have enough history:

• AI Visibility — the headline score (0–100) for how often your brand shows up across the tracked engines.
• Content Gaps — the prompts where competitors got cited and you didn’t. Flagged by priority so the commercial ones sit on top.
• Quality Score — average across any drafts you review (SEO, tone, correctness). Empty until you generate a first piece.
• Content Volume — how much you’ve shipped, what’s in review, what’s new this week.

Below the hero, an activity feed and a recommended-actions panel tell you exactly what to do next. You rarely have to decide where to click — Surfaced surfaces the highest-leverage step.

Turning your first gap into an article

Once your baseline is in, the workflow is three clicks:

1. Open Insights → Gaps. Pick a high-priority gap — one where a competitor gets cited for a prompt you care about.
2. Promote the gap into an idea in Create → Ideas. The target prompt, the competitor’s citation, and the recommended angle are pulled in automatically.
3. Click Generate. Surfaced produces a citation-optimised draft grounded in your brand voice and knowledge base. Review, tweak, publish or export. Done.

Re-check the dashboard a week or two later. The gap you closed will shift from the gap list to your citation feed — and your AI Visibility score should tick up. That’s the whole loop: surface a gap, close a gap, measure the lift.

If something feels off

The auto-generated prompts don’t fit your business

Two causes: the crawl hit a thin or placeholder homepage, or your positioning is vague. Edit any prompt in place, or add your own directly from the same screen. You can also re-run analysis later from settings after you’ve updated the site copy.

Your AI Visibility score is low on day one

Completely normal. It confirms the opportunity. Close the top three high-priority gaps, wait a week or two for the engines to re-crawl, and check again. Movement happens in waves, not minutes.

Drafts don’t sound like your brand yet

Surfaced generates against your workspace engine — brand voice, knowledge base, preferred phrasing. If outputs feel generic, visit Settings → Workspace → Engine, add a few sentences on how your brand writes and paste in a couple of reference documents. The next generation will feel meaningfully more on-brand.

You want to see results before signing up

Run a free scan. Same six engines, no account, two minutes to a shareable report. It’s the fastest way to show a colleague or client what Surfaced actually sees.

Where to go from here

• Check back regularly. The dashboard will already have trend data — compare against your baseline to see movement.
• Invite the team. On Pro and Business, bring in writers, reviewers or clients so everyone sees the same data.
• Go multilingual. If you sell into multiple markets, add language-specific prompt sets via multilingual tracking.
• Let the recommended actions do the driving. On any given day the dashboard surfaces the single highest-leverage task. If you’re not sure what to work on next, start there.

That’s the whole product promise: you bring the URL, Surfaced brings the rest.

Frequently asked questions