Skip to main content
Onboarding sets up the profile Surfais needs to run scans, audits, and recommendations correctly. It takes a few minutes, and nothing is final — you can go back to any earlier step before you confirm, and every field you fill in can be changed later.
Setting up an agency account? Read Agency accounts below first — the flow branches early, and most agencies skip straight past brand setup to add client brands afterwards.

​
The walkthrough

1

Brand or agency

First choice: Single brand or Agency — one brand to track, or a workspace for managing several client brands.Choosing Agency asks whether you also want to track the agency’s own AI visibility alongside your clients. Leave this off and click Skip — go straight to plan to bypass brand setup entirely (see Agency accounts). Turn it on, or pick Single brand, and you’ll continue through the steps below.Enter your brand or agency name and website domain — Surfais uses the domain to auto-fill the next step.
You can switch between Single brand and Agency at any point before you choose a plan, but not once a subscription is active.
2

Verify your domain

Surfais scrapes your domain and drafts a tagline, industry, identity tags, and service tags. Review what came back and correct anything that’s off — this is a starting point, not a final answer.If the auto-fill comes back empty (some sites block automated reads), you’ll see a note and a Retry auto-fill button. You can also fill the fields in by hand.
3

Category, business model & scale

Four fields: industry, geography, business model, and scale. These decide which AI-visibility recommendations apply to your brand later — a local plumber and a B2B SaaS company get very different audit playbooks, and this is where that distinction gets set. All four are required before you can continue.Read Category, business model & scale for every business model option and why this step matters.
4

Aliases

Optional. Add other names your brand goes by (a parent company, trading name, common misspelling) and any other domains you own, so Surfais correctly attributes mentions under a different identity than your primary name and domain.Skip if you’re not sure — add aliases any time from brand aliases.
5

Competitors

Optional. Add up to five competitors by name and domain, or accept an AI-suggested one. Skip if you’d rather add these later.Read Adding competitors for how matching works and your plan’s cap.
6

Suggested prompts

Surfais generates ten starter prompts — realistic questions a customer might ask an AI platform where your brand could plausibly come up — and adds them straight to your prompt library. Edit any inline, remove ones that don’t fit, or add your own. At least one prompt is required to continue.Manage the full library, including country and platform targeting, from Prompts at any time.
7

Review & confirm

A summary screen covering everything you’ve filled in, with a per-section Edit link that jumps straight back to the step that owns it — no need to click Back repeatedly to fix one field.Confirming takes you to the live preview scan.

​
The live preview scan

After you confirm, Surfais runs a real scan of your actual brand. Pick a country and one AI platform — Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews — and Surfais queries your top 3 prompts against that platform live, showing whether your brand was mentioned, where it ranked, and what was cited, as results come back. This isn’t a mock-up: it’s the same pipeline that powers your ongoing scans, run once against a sample of the prompts you just set up, so you see real evidence of how your brand shows up before you commit to a plan. The other four platforms stay locked during the preview — once you’re on a plan, scans cover your full prompt library across the platforms each prompt runs on.
The preview scan only covers the platform and country you pick. Once your plan starts, scheduled scans run across every prompt, platform, and country you’ve configured.

​
Going back before you confirm

You don’t have to move through the wizard in a straight line. The step indicator at the top is clickable for any step you’ve already completed — click an earlier circle to jump back, change something, and step forward again. Nothing already saved is lost by navigating back and forth. To discard everything and start over, use Start over in the onboarding header. This resets the wizard but keeps you signed in.

​
Changing your answers later

Nothing from onboarding is locked in:

Brand profile

Category, business model, geography, scale — plus tagline, identity tags, service tags.

Brand aliases

Other names and domains your brand is known by.

Competitors

Add, edit, or remove tracked competitors, and see your share-of-voice leaderboard.

Prompts

The full prompt library — add, edit, remove, and target by country and platform.
Brand name and domain are the two onboarding answers that can’t be edited from settings — contact support to rename a brand or move it to a new domain.

​
Agency accounts

If you’re setting up an agency account and skip tracking the agency’s own AI visibility, onboarding ends immediately after step one. You land on a welcome screen explaining your plan’s client-brand allowance, and go straight to adding your first client brand. Each client brand added afterwards goes through its own short setup (domain, category, competitors, prompts) scoped to that brand — agencies track competitors, prompts, and scores per brand, not pooled across the account. Read Getting started with agencies for the full agency setup flow, and Managing brands for adding, switching between, and organising client brands.