Getting started

Overview#

Setup is a single screen with three fields on it. Everything after that runs in the background, and Seerly emails you once your dashboard is ready. If onboarding cannot finish, no email is sent; your dashboard shows where it stopped instead.

Nothing gets installed on your website in the process. No code, no tracking pixel, no DNS change and no plugin, which also means there is nothing for your developers to schedule.

The setup screen#

Analyze your website

Enter your domain and target region to get started

Domain

Just the domain, with no https:// and no page path

example.com

Target Region

Global

Business focus areas(optional)

Up to 5

What parts of your business should we prioritise? Press Enter or click Add after each.

e.g. solar panel installation

Start Analysis→

Your domain is checked as you type, and you will see Verifying domain... while that happens. If it succeeds you get the page title back, which is a quick confirmation you have typed the right address.

If the check does not succeed, the message tells you why, and the reasons are not equivalent:

• We could not verify this site's security certificate. Some certificate chains cannot be validated even though a browser accepts them. You can proceed; the crawl may still work.
• This site builds its pages with JavaScript. The page returns nothing readable until a browser runs its scripts, and the analysis does not run scripts. Proceeding will find no content, so this one is worth resolving before you continue. Usually that means pointing us at a server-rendered version of the site, if one exists.
• We could not reach this domain. Check the spelling first. If it is right, the site may be refusing automated requests.
• The site took too long to respond. Usually temporary. Waiting a moment and checking again is often enough.
• That address does not return a web page. The address resolves to something that is not a page, such as a file or an API endpoint. Check you have given us the site's home page. A site that keeps every page under a section such as /en/, with no page at the home address itself, shows this message too. You can proceed with it: Smart Audit reads such a site from the sitemaps its robots.txt lists.
• We could not run the check just now. This one is on our side rather than your site, so there is nothing to fix at your end.

You can proceed past any of these. Only the JavaScript case reliably produces an empty analysis.

If the domain already belongs to a project under another account at your company, you will be offered the option of requesting access to that project rather than starting a second one. It is worth taking. Two disconnected projects covering one brand split the history between them and produce two sets of numbers that quietly disagree, and there is no good way to reconcile them afterwards.

Target Region is the country you sell into, and it decides both which market your prompts describe and which market your search volumes are drawn from.

This is the most consequential field on the page and the easiest one to leave sitting on a default. A brand selling into Germany but set up for the United States will receive a confident, coherent and entirely accurate picture of a market it does not operate in, and nothing further down the product will flag the mismatch, because from the inside there is nothing to flag.

Business focus areas, optional on the form but worth the minute, is a short list of what your business actually does, written in your own words. These steer the analysis toward the right part of your category, which matters because a website is not always a reliable guide to what a company sells most of. Plenty of businesses have a homepage describing their ambitions and a revenue line describing something more specific.

What they reach, once you have named them:

• The keywords Seerly builds your universe from, and how it decides which clusters are on brand.
• The starter topics, where the first few you name are each guaranteed one.
• The wording of the prompts Seerly tracks, so a prompt about a priority is phrased the way a buyer of that part of the business would ask.
• Your Brand Hub profile, including the audience and differentiators it derives.
• The content ideas Seerly suggests, and the order your agents put their recommendations in.

They rank rather than restrict. A priority moves things up the list where the evidence already supports them; it never invents an opportunity Seerly cannot see, and it never makes the rest of your business off limits.

The form applies a few rules quietly, and they are worth knowing about before you paste anything in:

• Five maximum. Paste a list of ten and the first five valid entries are kept.
• Between two and sixty characters each. Anything outside that range is dropped without telling you.
• Press Enter or click Add to add each one. A comma stays part of the entry, so "accounts receivable, denial management" is one focus area. A list pasted with one item per line is added line by line.
• Duplicates are removed, ignoring case.

Write them the way you would describe the business to a new salesperson on their first morning. "Custom sticker printing" will do considerably more for you than "printing", and "B2B SaaS onboarding software" more than "software". Specificity here is what stops the analysis drifting into an adjacent market that happens to share your vocabulary.

None of this is a one-shot decision. You can change focus areas later in Brand Hub, which also accepts a longer list than this form does: up to 20 there against five here. Five is the right number to start with, since the first analysis builds a small starter set of topics around them, so name the priorities and add the rest afterwards.

What happens next#

You land on a screen headed We're onboarding your site, and from that point the work runs without you. It tells you it will email you the moment things are ready and that you can safely close the tab. The second holds whatever happens: there is nothing further to approve, and leaving does not pause anything. The first holds when onboarding finishes; if onboarding stops, no email is sent (see If onboarding doesn't finish).

You do not need to keep the screen open, but if you do, it tracks onboarding as it runs. When onboarding finishes it takes you to your dashboard, and if onboarding stops it swaps the onboarding card for one saying where.

Under Working on it, four stages are listed:

We're onboarding your site

Working on it

1. 1

   Smart audit

   Scanning your site's AI readiness

2. 2

   Keyword universe

   Mapping what your customers actually search

3. 3

   Topics & prompts

   The questions AI should surface you for

4. 4

   Visibility & sentiment

   Testing how AI answers about you today

That order is deliberate rather than cosmetic, and it is worth understanding because it is the same dependency chain the rest of the product runs on. The keyword universe becomes your topics, your topics become the prompts that get sent to AI engines, and those prompts produce every visibility, sentiment and citation number you will read afterwards. It is also why a mistake in an early stage is expensive: everything downstream inherits it faithfully.

How long onboarding takes#

The screen tells you what to expect: typically about an hour, and up to 4 to 6 hours on Pro, where the coverage is widest.

The gap between those two is not a fault and does not mean something has gone wrong. Wider coverage means more engines and more prompts, so there is straightforwardly more to run, and the extra time buys you a broader picture at the end of it. What the wait is never doing is asking for your attention: however long onboarding takes, the email arrives when it finishes. If the email hasn't arrived after the time above, open your dashboard.

One thing can lengthen the wait: if Seerly cannot reach your site, it normally tries again first, and the onboarding card stays up in the meantime. See If onboarding doesn't finish for the detail.

If you open your dashboard before onboarding is over, you will see a card there, on every page, rather than a half-populated dashboard: the same onboarding card while it runs, or the card described below if it has stopped. That is intentional. Partial numbers invite conclusions the data cannot yet support, and a dashboard showing three of your twelve topics looks disconcertingly like a dashboard showing bad results. The one exception is a free plan that has ended, when that notice comes first.

If onboarding doesn't finish#

If onboarding stops before it is done, the onboarding card is replaced by one headed We couldn't finish onboarding your site, both on the onboarding screen and on every page of your dashboard, unless your free plan has ended, when that notice comes first. Seerly does not email you about it, so this card is where you find out.

When your site could not be reached, Seerly normally tries again first. It retries onboarding once, automatically, at least 35 minutes after the first attempt stopped, and the onboarding card stays up while it waits. The failure card appears once that retry has failed or couldn't run. Any other reason shows the card straight away.

The sentence under the heading says why onboarding stopped, in one of four ways:

• Your site could not be reached. It was down, it blocked our crawler, or its security certificate could not be verified.
• Your site was reached, but none of its pages could be read.
• Your plan is not fully set up yet.
• Something went wrong on our side. The card says what onboarding was doing at the time, such as mapping what your customers search.

Each version ends by asking you to get in touch. Below it, under Where it stopped, the card lists the four stages again and marks how far onboarding got:

We couldn't finish onboarding your site

Where it stopped

Smart audit

Done

Keyword universe

Stopped here

Topics & prompts

Not started

Visibility & sentiment

Not started

Contact us is the card's only button. It opens an email to our support team with your domain already in the subject line, and we look into it from there.

If your site could not be reached, Troubleshooting lists what to check before you get in touch.

When your dashboard is ready#

When onboarding finishes you will get an email. Open the Overview, and before you read a single score, check the three inputs that determine what every one of those scores actually means:

• Topics. Do they describe what you genuinely sell? They were derived for you, so this will be the first time anyone has looked at them.
• Region. Does it match the market you sell into?
• Competitors. Are these the companies you would name in a pitch? Seerly identifies likely ones from your category and you decide which are tracked.

If any of the three is wrong, fix it before forming an opinion about anything else. Corrections made here propagate everywhere; corrections made later mean re-reading numbers you have already drawn conclusions from, which is a harder thing to do honestly than it sounds.

Best practices#

Not a great deal, on Day 1, and that is the expected situation rather than a disappointing one. A single run is a snapshot. It tells you where you stand and says nothing about which direction you are moving in, and direction is the part that eventually matters.

Three things are genuinely useful straight away:

• The topic list, because it tells you whether Seerly understood your business, and that is the one thing worth knowing before you trust anything else.
• Smart audit findings, because they are fixes on your own site, entirely within your control, and they determine whether AI engines can cite you at all.
• Citations, because they show which sources shape answers in your category whether or not those sources currently mention you, and that list changes far more slowly than your scores do.

Next steps#

1. Fix the inputs first if topics, region or competitors are wrong.
2. Work through the Smart Audit findings, starting with anything about crawler access. If AI crawlers cannot read your pages, nothing else you do this month will help.
3. Read citations before visibility. Visibility tells you that you are missing; citations tell you what is being cited instead, and that is the half you can act on.
4. Then write something aimed at a real gap rather than at a guess.

Your first week sets that order out day by day.

What to keep in mind#

The first run establishes a baseline and nothing more. It cannot tell you whether you are improving, which needs several runs on your plan's schedule before the question is even answerable.

Seerly measures how AI engines describe your brand. It does not edit what they say, and nobody can. What it does is show you which sources shape that description, so that you can go and influence them.

Which engines are covered, and how many prompts run, depend on your plan. See seerly.app/pricing.