Quickstart: onboarding
From a website URL to your first AI visibility report in about 15 minutes. Along the way you make three real decisions — everything else runs in the background while you watch it happen live.
Before you start
This walkthrough picks up once you have an account and an active plan — if you’re not there yet, Accounts & billing covers signup, the private-beta invite, and choosing a plan.
For onboarding itself you need one thing: a live website URL. There’s also an optional field — “what do you sell, in one sentence?” — worth filling in if your site is thin on copy, since it helps the analysis fill in the gaps. Nothing else is required. You don’t need WordPress connected, competitors chosen, or anything else prepared in advance — onboarding builds all of that for you and lets you correct it.
The five steps
Onboarding is a short wizard with a progress tracker at the top — Website, Brand, Competitors, Prompts, Baseline. Two of those steps (Website and Competitors) briefly hand off to a background job while you watch a live status screen, so the walkthrough below has a couple more moments than the tracker shows.
Enter your website URL
Type in your URL and, optionally, one sentence on what you sell. Submitting starts the analysis immediately in the background — you land on a live progress screen with three phases ticking off: “Reading your site…”, “Identifying your brand…”, and “Extracting topics and audience…” This step reads your homepage plus, where they exist, your /about and /pricing pages, and pulls out your brand name, likely aliases, a description, category, target audience, and 5–8 core topics. It usually takes just a few seconds — not the full 15 minutes.
Confirm your brand profile
You land on a pre-filled card: brand name, category, a comma-separated list of aliases, a one-line description, who it’s for, and your core topics. Every field is editable.
Pay real attention to aliases — they’re how OptimizeCamp recognizes your brand inside an AI answer even when it’s written slightly differently (“OptimizeCamp” vs. “Optimize Camp”, or a product name your brand goes by). Get this wrong and mentions get missed. See Your brand profile for more on why this profile drives everything downstream. Click “Looks right →” when it does.
Pick your competitors
From your confirmed brand profile, OptimizeCamp suggests your most likely rivals — real companies in your category with a real website, never guessed domains. You’ll see a short “Finding your competitors” screen for a few seconds while this runs.
You land on up to ten candidates, strongest first, each with a short note on why it competes. The strongest are checked by default, up to your plan’s competitor cap (3 on Starter, 5 on Pro, 10 on Agency); uncheck any that aren’t real competitors, and add others by name and domain if we missed one. If nothing was found automatically, you’ll be asked to add your competitors manually instead. Confirm with “Track these competitors →”.
Pick your prompts
A prompt is one of the questions OptimizeCamp will periodically ask ChatGPT and Google AI on your behalf, then check the answer for your brand — see Prompts, runs & answers for the full model. OptimizeCamp proposes around 30 candidates, grouped into four categories: Branded (“is {brand} good for …”), Unbranded / category (“best {category} tools for …”), Comparison (“{brand} vs {competitor}”), and Informational (top-of-funnel questions on your core topics). Every prompt is checked by default — uncheck what isn’t relevant, edit any prompt’s wording, or add your own. Confirm with “Run my baseline →”.
Watch your baseline run
This is the moment everything else was building toward. A baseline run fires immediately: every prompt you kept, asked of both ChatGPT and Google AI. It’s called a baseline because it’s the starting line — the first measurement every future run gets compared against, so you can see what later runs observe. A time-series comparison can show movement; it does not establish which change caused it.
You’ll watch a live progress bar with a running count: “12 of 50 answers analyzed — you’ve been mentioned 3 times so far.” This partial-results ticker is deliberate — you don’t wait behind a blank spinner, you watch real results land. You can safely leave the page; the run keeps going and your report is ready when you’re back.
If onboarding stops you
A couple of steps are bounded by your plan. The Competitors and Prompts steps preselect up to your plan’s caps, and submitting more than that is refused with a concrete count (“max N competitors per project,” or how many pooled prompt slots are left) — deselect a few or upgrade to go higher. Adding your own domain as a competitor is rejected too (“a brand can’t compete with itself”). And if you’re onboarding an additional site on a plan already at its project limit, or your workspace has gone read-only, onboarding asks you to upgrade or pick a plan first.
What your first report shows
When the baseline finishes, you’re dropped straight onto the Visibility dashboard. For a brand-new project this is intentionally blunt: your overall Visibility Score, a per-platform breakdown (ChatGPT vs. Google AI), your Share of Voice against the competitors you picked, four headline stats (mention rate, citation rate, position score, sentiment), and — the part worth reading first — a “Your weakest prompts” panel listing the questions where you were absent on every platform. That panel is deliberately your first move: it is, in the product’s own words, “the first place to win.”
Note
Onboarding doesn’t ask about WordPress, and nothing about it blocks your baseline. Whenever you’re ready, connect your site from Settings so pages sync in for optimization and fixes can publish back as drafts — see Connecting WordPress. Until then, you can still bring individual pages in by URL or by pasting content.
Next step
Now that you have a baseline, get oriented in the app itself — Navigating the app walks through the sidebar and how each screen maps to the measure-fix-create-prove loop.