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Surfais measures what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews say about your brand when someone asks. This page walks through onboarding — from telling us who you are to seeing your first live results — and what happens immediately afterwards.

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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 your prompts

We generate 10 starter prompts — the questions real customers might ask an AI assistant that your brand should show up for. Edit, remove, or add your own. These are already saved to your prompt library, so nothing here is thrown away if you leave and come back.
7

Review and confirm

A final summary of everything above, with an edit link back to each section. Once you confirm, we set up your tracking.

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The live preview scan

After onboarding, you land on an optional live demo. Pick one AI platform and a country, and we’ll run your top 3 prompts against it in real time — you’ll typically see results within 10–45 seconds, depending on the platform. Perplexity is usually fastest. For each prompt, you’ll see whether your brand was mentioned, roughly where you appeared, and how many sources were cited. If your brand shows up, you’ll also see a locked teaser of what the other 4 platforms would show. If it doesn’t, we’re upfront about that too — that’s exactly the gap the full scan is built to help you close.
This demo only checks one platform and your top 3 prompts, so treat it as a taste rather than a full read on your visibility. It’s optional — you can skip it and go straight to picking a plan.

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Choosing a plan and your first full scan

From the preview screen, choosing a plan takes you into checkout. Pricing details and plan comparisons live on surfais.com/pricing — we don’t duplicate prices here since they can change. Once you’re set up, 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. Your dashboard walks you through a short “get scan-ready” checklist first (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.

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What’s next

Once your first scan completes, head to your dashboard to see your AIS Score and where you stand. From there: