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 Mode 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 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.