Documentation
Brand and monitoring setup
Launch GEO Scout in a few minutes: onboarding, prompts, competitors, and your first monitoring run
Contents
- 01 Run onboarding and pick prompts for your first run
- 02 First data and your first report
- 03 Set up prompts, clusters, and monitoring engines
- 04 Brand settings: variations, business context, and Telegram reports
- 05 Invite teammates to work on the brand together
- 06 Launch monitoring and start the full cycle
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, Alice AI, and Google AI Overview on its own.
- Step 1 — enter your site URL. GEO Scout parses the homepage, detects the brand, and shows what it found so you can confirm it's the right domain
- Step 2 — review the brand data. AI has already detected the name, pulled a description, and prepared business context. Fix anything off or leave as is — the sharper the entities, the better the recommendations and reports
- Business context (the "Optional" block) refines how the system finds your competitors. Business model — B2B, B2C, D2C, or Marketplace; turn on "Strict filtering" to keep only companies of the same business type in your competitor set and avoid mixing, say, a B2B service with marketplaces
- Niche sets your industry (e.g. "Finance & fintech") — it's used by the recommendation engine so advice and content ideas stay relevant to your market
- Target geography is the most important field: it determines the coordinates GEO Scout sends queries from to the AI engines. Use Country for nationwide monitoring or City for local monitoring. For a local city business, set the specific city — otherwise AI answers from the wrong locale and the competitors won't be yours. For a nationwide brand, selecting the country is enough
- Step 3 — pick up to five prompts for the trial run. Choose from the generated list or add your own. Narrow, niche prompts surface more accurate competitors than broad queries. Once you finish, GEO Scout sends them to ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Alice AI, and Google AI Overview — the first results appear in the dashboard within a few minutes
- The trial run is free: 5 prompts every 7 days. That's enough to see your first visibility patterns and learn which AI providers surface you and which skip you — before you upgrade 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 your first AI-visibility data and GEO Scout automatically compiles your first report. It lives in the "Reports" tab — one click opens the PDF, ready to share with your team or a client.
- KPI cards fill in from real AI answers: answer coverage, Share of Voice, domain citations, and Citation Share — your own numbers replace the demo values
- The dashboard shows the competitive landscape right away: Share of Voice dynamics between brands and a radar benchmark comparing your brand with top competitors across five AI-visibility metrics
- The first report is generated automatically and saved to the "Reports" tab — a ready-made visibility breakdown with metrics, competitors, sources, and growth areas
- One click opens the report as a PDF: view it online or download and forward it. A sample report is attached above
Your first report is built from a single run — it's a starting point. The longer monitoring runs, the richer the reports get: period-over-period dynamics, competitor comparisons, and the measurable impact of your changes.
3.Set up prompts, clusters, and monitoring engines
Monitoring → Prompts is where you manage everything measured each day: the prompt list, clusters and their geography, plus the set of AI engines. Every selected engine is queried daily on each active prompt. Your plan sets a fixed prompt volume; additional engines are added separately.
- Your plan sets a fixed prompt volume. The top panel shows how many prompts are active out of your plan's limit, plus answer coverage
- Split prompts into clusters by meaning — e.g. "Online payments for e-commerce" and "Acquiring for the self-employed". Metrics — visibility, Share of Voice, citation share — are counted separately per cluster
- Each cluster has its own geography (gear icon → "Edit group" → "Geography" block): inherit from the brand, city, or country. City geography is critical for local scenarios — e.g. "choosing a store in Moscow": GEO Scout sends queries from that city's coordinates, so the answers surface local competitors rather than nationwide ones
- A cluster's geography overrides the brand settings for every prompt in the group. This lets one brand run several geo directions at once — say, a Moscow cluster and a Saint Petersburg cluster — without creating a separate brand per city
- Engines are picked as a flat set: every selected engine is queried daily on each active prompt (no day-by-day rotation). The number and mix of engines aren't fixed by your plan — you configure them yourself from the full list (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overview, Alice AI, GigaChat, Claude, Yandex with Alice)
- Premium engines — Claude and Yandex with Alice — are added as paid options in the "Add-ons" block and are billed higher than the rest. Each added engine increases coverage and the plan price
- Regular engines are billed cheaper, premium ones higher; exact plan and option prices are shown on the Pricing page
- On the free plan the engine set is fixed (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Alice AI, Google AI Overview) and can't be changed; on paid plans you configure the number and mix of engines yourself. Partner accounts run on a credit balance: a regular-engine run costs 1 credit, a premium-engine run costs 2
Start with a few lower-cost engines and add premium ones (Claude, Yandex with Alice) selectively — where that specific model matters. This keeps coverage high while keeping spend under control.
4.Brand settings: variations, business context, and Telegram reports
In Settings → Brand you fine-tune how GEO Scout recognizes your brand and generates content: name variations, additional domains, business context, and content language. And in the Notifications tab you can connect a Telegram bot for weekly visibility reports.
- Name variations help recognize your brand in LLM answers across different spellings. Needed for non-obvious cases: a rebrand (e.g. T-Bank / Tinkoff), non-standard transliteration (YooMoney), or internal abbreviations. Ordinary case variants are handled by the system. Without variations, AI can split your Share of Voice between two names and show artificially low numbers
- Additional domains — if the brand runs on several sites (main and regional, primary and a blog on a separate domain, landing pages), add them all: a citation of any one domain counts toward your Citation Share. Especially important for holdings, media groups, and post-M&A brands
- Business context → "Brand description" is used to identify competitors and generate insights, recommendations, and content. The sharper the description, the more relevant the competitors and topics GEO Scout picks — it's worth reviewing and fixing the auto-collected text
- "Niche" is used by the recommendation engine so advice and topics stay relevant to your market, while "Business type" (B2B, B2C, D2C, Marketplace) refines which competitors count as yours
- "Content language" (Russian / English) sets the language of every AI-generated artifact: reports, articles, recommendations, and briefs. It doesn't change the language of the AI providers' answers and is independent of the interface — you can work in a Russian UI and receive content in English
- Telegram reports (the Notifications tab) — connect the bot to get the weekly visibility report directly in your messenger, without opening the dashboard. Click "Open Telegram bot", start it with /start, and enter the link code — each brand is connected separately
- The weekly report covers the key changes in a compact format: Share of Voice and citation shifts, prompts that rose or dropped, competitors gaining ground. A convenient way to keep a finger on the pulse without opening the dashboard every day
After a rebrand, keep the old name in the variations list for at least a year: LLMs train on historical data and keep mentioning the brand by its previous name long after. Remove the variation — lose those mentions and a real chunk of your Share of Voice.
5.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.
6.Launch monitoring and start the full cycle
Once your plan is paid, the monitoring page shows a "Ready to launch" banner. Double-check your prompts and clusters, click "Launch monitoring" — and GEO Scout starts the daily cycle of observation, diagnosis, change, and verification.
- The "Ready to launch" banner appears automatically once the subscription is active. Two buttons: "Go to prompts" to review setup once more, and "Launch monitoring" to start right now
- After launch, GEO Scout runs your prompts through the selected AI providers daily within your daily budget. Visibility, Share of Voice, and citation metrics refresh by the next morning
- From day one, history starts building: metric dynamics by day, week, and month; period comparisons; the measured effect of your site updates and external publications
- This is the start of the full visibility cycle. From here on: weekly reports, data-backed recommendations, an action plan for the site and external sources — all in one platform
Don't rush to optimize right after launch — give the system 3–5 days to accumulate data. More observations means sharper signals about real patterns and weak spots, not random noise from one or two AI answers.