Quickstart

This walkthrough takes you from sign-up to a first baseline and a Site Audit.

#1. Create an account

Start a free trial or sign up for the free plan. Trail and Summit give you 14 days of the plan with no card; when the trial ends you move to Scout, and nothing is deleted or charged. If email confirmation is switched on for your deployment, confirm your address from the email we send — you need it to start collecting answers.

#2. Create a project

Enter:

• Your website — the domain you want engines to cite, for example example.com.
• Brand name — how people name you in questions. Add other names (abbreviations, product names) later in Project settings.
• What you sell — a short category phrase such as "approval workflow software". Citeroot uses it to write your starter questions.
• Competitors (optional) — one per line, optionally followed by | their-domain.com. Up to ten. Competitors give you share of voice and gap lists.

Citeroot creates a starter panel of questions across the five buying stages. Review it on the Prompts page: pause questions that don't sound like your buyers, add your own, or paste a list.

#3. Run your first collection

Press Run now on the Overview page. A run asks every active prompt on each engine your project uses, so ten prompts on two engines is twenty answers. Progress appears live, and collection continues in the background if you leave the page. Most first runs finish in a few minutes.

Each answer counts against your plan's monthly allowance; answers that fail don't.

#4. Read the results

• Overview shows how often you're named, how often your site is cited, how often you're recommended and your share of voice — each with a 95% interval — plus the questions where you're missing.
• Answers lists every answer; open one to read it with your brand highlighted and its sources beneath.
• Sources shows which domains the answers cite and, on Summit, the gaps.

With fewer than five answers a number is shown but labelled "not enough data yet". Treat early percentages as a first look, not a measurement.

#5. Audit your site

Open Site audit. The homepage plus a few pages are checked straight away. To audit up to your plan's page limit, verify that you control the domain.

#6. Keep going

Automatic runs repeat on a schedule that fits your allowance, so the trend fills in without you. Add competitors, tighten the panel, and use Briefs and Insights (beta) when you know what to fix.