Before you start
You’ll want your brand’s website domain to hand — most of onboarding auto-fills from it. Everything else (competitors, prompts, aliases) can be edited or skipped and changed later, so don’t worry about getting it perfect on the first pass.1
Tell us your brand
Enter your brand (or agency) name and website domain. We use the domain to auto-fill a tagline, industry, identity tags, and services — pulled from your site so you don’t have to type them out. If the auto-fill comes back empty (some sites block automated reads), you can retry or fill the fields in manually.If you’re signing up as an agency, you’ll also choose whether to track your own agency’s AI visibility alongside your clients, or skip straight to picking a plan.
2
Check the auto-filled profile
Review the tagline, industry, and tags we pulled from your domain. Tweak anything that’s off — this feeds straight into how we classify your brand later.
3
Set category, geography, business model and scale
These filters decide which recommendations apply to you later — a B2B SaaS company and a local e-commerce store get different advice, so this step keeps that advice relevant rather than generic.
4
Add brand aliases (optional)
List any other names your brand goes by — a parent company, a trading name, common misspellings, or domains you also own. This helps us catch mentions under those identities rather than missing them, and stops us wrongly flagging “no listing found” when a listing actually sits under a different name. Skip this if you’re not sure; you can add aliases later from brand settings.
5
Add competitors
Add up to 5 competitors to benchmark against. We’ll suggest some based on your domain — accept the ones that fit or add your own. Your Share of Voice is measured against every brand the AI platforms name, so it’s computed even before you track competitors — but naming them unlocks the head-to-head comparisons and the competitor leaderboard. Skip if you’d rather add them later.
6
Review and confirm
A final summary of everything above, with an edit link back to each section. Once you confirm, you choose how to start.
Choose a plan
After you confirm, pick how to start: Get full access now, or begin the 7-day free trial. Pricing details and plan comparisons live on surfais.com/pricing — we don’t duplicate prices here since they can change.Add the prompts you want to track
Onboarding doesn’t add prompts for you — the questions you track are yours to choose. Open the Prompts page and type or paste your own, upload a CSV, or add from the recommended prompts; nothing is tracked until you add it. We recommend starting with 10–15 prompts. If you need help choosing the most impactful prompts, contact support. See Setting up prompts for every way to add them.Your first full scan
Every brand gets one free baseline scan — your first full scan across all 5 platforms doesn’t use any of your monthly manual-scan allowance. On a new account, nothing is scanned until you start it: your dashboard walks you through a short “get scan-ready” checklist first (your prompts, competitors and aliases materially change what the baseline finds, so we ask you to either complete them or explicitly confirm you want to run without). Once you kick it off, the scan typically finishes in 5–10 minutes, and you’ll get an email when it’s ready — you can safely close the tab and come back. That first scan becomes your baseline: the number every later reading is compared against. After it lands, automatic scans take over on your plan’s schedule (see Scan schedule) — you don’t need to trigger anything manually to stay current.What’s next
Once your first scan completes, head to your dashboard to see your AIS Score and where you stand. From there:- Understanding your dashboard — what every widget means
- How scans work — what happens during a scan, end to end
- The AIS Score — how the headline number is calculated
- Setting up prompts — refine what you’re tracking
- Setting up competitors — add or adjust who you’re benchmarked against