Documentation
Brand and monitoring setup
Launch GEO Scout in a few minutes: onboarding, prompts, competitors, and your first monitoring run
Contents
1.Run onboarding and pick prompts for your first run
Onboarding sets up GEO Scout in three steps: enter your site, review the brand data and refine the business context, then pick up to five prompts for a trial run. The whole flow takes a few minutes — then the system checks your visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, GigaChat, and Alice AI on its own.
- Step 1 — enter your site URL and hit "Check". GEO Scout parses the homepage and shows a "Website verified" card with the favicon, title, and description, so you can confirm it's the right domain before the analysis starts
- Step 2 — review the brand name. This is the exact name the system looks for in AI answers. Click the pencil if the parser picked up the wrong thing: a chunk of the page title or a tagline instead of the name ("Kwork — freelance services marketplace" instead of "Kwork"), or a spelling your audience never actually uses
- The "Other brand names" block — add the spellings people use for you in answers: Latin and Cyrillic ("Kwork" and "Кворк"), abbreviations, a pre-rebrand name, the legal entity. We look for the brand across all of these at once, so a mention isn't lost when an AI names you differently than your site does
- The brand description (up to 500 characters) is drafted by AI from your site. It feeds more accurate recommendations, report generation, and competitor detection — rewrite it if the system misread what you do
- Business context is optional, but worth filling in. The business model (B2B, B2C, D2C, or Marketplace) tells the AI how to read your market when generating queries and recognising competitors in answers
- Niche sets your industry (e.g. "B2B services" or "Finance & fintech"). It's used by the recommendation engine so advice and content ideas stay relevant to your market, and by the technical site check: each niche has its own Schema markup — medical gets MedicalOrganization, an online store gets OnlineStore, instead of a generic Organization
- Target geography is the most important field: this is the location we set in the browser before sending the query, and it decides which locale the answer comes from. For a local city business pick "City" and name the exact city — otherwise AI answers from the wrong locale and the competitors won't be yours. For a nationwide brand, "Country" is enough
- Step 3 — pick up to five prompts for the trial run. Generated prompts are grouped by topic, and you can add your own wording via the "Enter your prompt" field. The "Selected 5/5" counter shows what's left, and the cross removes a prompt you don't need. Narrow, niche prompts surface more accurate competitors than broad queries. The trial run is free — 5 prompts every 7 days, enough to see your first visibility patterns before upgrading to a paid plan
Start with prompts your customers would actually use to find you. A broad query like "freelance marketplace" creates noise in the competitor list; a narrow one ("where to find a freelancer for a WordPress online store") surfaces direct competitors and clean signals you can act on.
2.First data and your first report
As soon as the trial run finishes, the dashboard fills with the first data on your AI visibility and GEO Scout automatically assembles a starter GEO audit. A link to it sits in a row above the KPI cards, and the document itself opens as a PDF — handy to show your team or a client.
- KPI cards fill up from real AI answers: answer reach, Share of Voice, domain citation rate and Citation Share — demo values are replaced by your numbers
- «Share of Voice dynamics» shows how brand shares are distributed over time, while the «Competitor ranking» next to it lines everyone up by reach, SoV, average position and sentiment — with a «Your brand» badge in the list
- The «Initial audit» row above the cards is your first finished document: a one-sentence takeaway, and a click opens the full PDF with a per-engine breakdown, strengths and weaknesses, and a source map
- The audit shows not only where you appear but also where you don't: for every prompt you see which engines mentioned the brand and at which position, which competitors they named and which domains they cited
- The «Next free run in …» counter shows when you can repeat the run on the free plan — data refreshes once a week, so draw your first conclusions from this snapshot
The first audit is built from a single run — it is a starting point, not a verdict. Look first at the competitor list and the source map: they show which platforms you need to appear on for the models to start naming you more often.
3.Set up prompts, clusters, and monitoring engines
In «Monitoring → Queries» you manage everything that gets measured daily: the prompt list (one by one or in bulk), clusters and their geography. The set of AI engines comes from your plan — every engine in it is queried daily for every active prompt.
- The «Monitoring → Queries» section is split into two columns: clusters with their summary on the left («1/10 active · reach 83% · SoV 33%»), the selected cluster's prompts on the right. Above the list sit that cluster's own metrics: reach, Share of Voice, average position and domain citation rate
- Your plan sets the limit of simultaneously active prompts. The toggle in each row turns a prompt on or off: anything above the limit is stored as inactive and never queried, so you can keep a large list and monitor selectively
- The «Bulk» button opens batch import: one prompt per line, with duplicates skipped automatically. You pick the group right there — an existing one or a new one via «+ New group…» — so the import lands in the right cluster instead of «No group»
- Before adding, the panel shows how many prompts will become active and how many will be created inactive because of the plan limit — you see the outcome before pressing «Add», not after
- Split prompts into clusters by meaning — for example, «Online payments for e-commerce» and «Acquiring for freelancers». Metrics — visibility, Share of Voice, citation rate — are calculated separately for each cluster
- Every cluster has its own geography (gear icon → «Edit group» → «Geography» block): inherit from the brand, a city, or a country. City-level geography is critical for local scenarios — for example, «choosing a store in Moscow»: GEO Scout sends queries from that city's coordinates, so answers surface local competitors instead of nationwide ones
- Cluster geography overrides brand settings for every prompt in the group. That lets one brand run several geo directions at once — a Moscow cluster and a St. Petersburg cluster, say — without creating a separate brand per city
- The set of AI engines is defined by your plan and is not selected inside «Queries» — you choose the mix when you buy or change a plan on the pricing page. Every engine in the plan is queried daily for every active prompt
- On the free plan the engine set is fixed — ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, GigaChat and Alice AI
Import prompts in bulk one topic at a time and assign the group right away: metrics are calculated per cluster, and they only mean something when the queries inside are homogeneous. Keep the list larger than your limit — inactive prompts cost nothing — and activate the directions you are actually fighting for visibility in right now.
4.Grow your query set with «Prompt discovery»
The «Prompt discovery» tab inside «Monitoring → Queries» suggests new queries based on your website, clusters, geography and brand business context. It is the way to extend coverage without inventing wordings by hand.
- Recommendations are grouped by your current clusters: the left column shows how many prompts a group already has and how many are suggested for it («10 prompts · 18 recommendations»)
- Each suggested query carries a «Why add it» line — what exactly this prompt will reveal in AI answers. Read it before adding: that way you pick queries by meaning, not by how they sound
- Every recommendation can be added or dismissed one by one, checked in batches, or taken all at once with «Add all (18)». Dismissed ones are never suggested again
- Queries are generated from an analysis of your website — products, categories, use cases and detected competitors — with the brand's geography taken into account, so the wordings come out local and conversational, the way people actually type them in chats
- Prompts you already track are filtered out of the recommendations — no duplicates will appear in the list
- At the bottom of the cluster column sits the «Suggested new clusters» block: the system spots demand segments your groups do not cover and offers to create them together with their prompts in one click
Start with the clusters that have the fewest prompts — that is where extending coverage moves visibility the most. And dismiss what does not fit right away: dismissed queries never resurface, so the recommendation list gets sharper over time.
5.Telegram visibility reports
The «Settings → Notifications» tab is where you connect the Telegram bot: the weekly brand visibility report arrives straight in the messenger, with no need to open the dashboard.
- Connecting takes a minute: press «Open Telegram bot», send /start to the bot and enter the linking code from this screen. While linking is in progress the page shows «Waiting for connection…» and picks up a successful connect on its own
- The code is single-use and short-lived — a «Expires in …» timer runs underneath it. If you miss the window, just generate a new one
- Telegram is connected per brand: reports cover exactly the brand you are currently in. If you run several brands, repeat the linking in each of them
- The weekly report holds the key changes in a compact format: Share of Voice and citation shifts, prompts that gained or dropped, competitors gaining ground
Connect the bot right after your first run: the report arrives on its own, so you spot a visibility drop during the week instead of the next time you happen to open the dashboard.
6.Invite teammates to work on the brand together
In Settings → Team the brand owner can invite teammates by email — each gets their own access to the dashboard, monitoring, and settings, while billing and brand removal stay with the owner. Available on every paid plan.
- Invite anyone by email. They receive a link; if they don't have a GEO Scout account yet, one is created automatically — no need to share credentials in advance
- Members see the same as the owner: dashboard, reports, monitorings, competitors, sources, AI traffic. They can edit prompts, competitors, and brand settings — full-fledged work with the data
- Billing and brand removal stay owner-only: the team can't accidentally change the plan or delete the brand. Managing the team — invitations and access revocation — is also reserved for the owner
- Revoke access at any time from the same Team tab: one click and the member loses access. A pending invitation link can be cancelled the same way
If your team works across several brands in different workspaces, invite people surgically — only into the brands where they actually contribute. Credits and the subscription are scoped to the brand, not the user, so adding a teammate doesn't increase your bill.
7.Launch monitoring
Launching monitoring becomes available once you pay for a plan: a «Ready to launch» banner appears on the «Monitoring → Queries» page. Pick the prompts you need, press «Launch monitoring» — a first run goes through, and after that monitoring runs daily.
- The «Ready to launch» banner appears automatically once the subscription is active. «Go to prompts» takes you to the list settings, «Launch monitoring» starts the run right away
- Check which prompts are active: the cluster panel shows «3/10 active prompts» and «8 of 100 active prompts on your plan». Only active prompts go into the run — toggle on what you want to track, within your plan limit
- After you press «Launch monitoring», a first run goes through the selected prompts, and then monitoring continues daily. The card metrics (reach, SoV, average position, domain citation rate) fill in by the next morning
- Statistics accumulate from the very first run: metric dynamics by day, week and month, period comparison, and the effect of your on-site changes and external publications
Don't rush to optimize right after launch — give the system at least 3–5 days to gather data. The more observations, the more reliably real patterns and weak spots surface instead of random noise in one or two AI answers.