Create a project
A project is one brand you track. Creating one takes about two minutes: paste your website, confirm the brand profile AppearIn builds, and you have a workspace ready for prompts and competitors. An accurate profile is what makes every later number trustworthy, so it's worth a careful look.
Before you start
You need a brand or company website URL. If you manage several brands, each one is its own project, create them separately so their visibility, competitors, and prompts stay cleanly separated.Create the project
Add your brand by URL
From the dashboard, choose Add brand and paste your website (for example acme.com). AppearIn reads the site to learn what you sell, how your brand name is written, and who your likely competitors are.
Review the brand profile
The brand profile is the set of facts AppearIn checks answers against. Confirm the brand name and add common variations, for example Acme, Acme Inc, and AcmeHQ. These variations are how we know an answer is really about you, and they directly affect mention detection and hallucination flags.
Confirm competitors
Review the competitors we detected and add any we missed. Three to five direct competitors is a good starting set. They are who your Share of Voice is measured against. You can change them later without losing history.
Add your first prompts
Add a few questions a customer would ask an assistant, or accept the prompts AppearIn suggests from your profile. Five to ten is enough to start. See build a prompt set for how to choose them well.
Run it
Finish onboarding. AppearIn seeds the first prompt run in the background, then shows your organic Share of Voice, mention rate, citation rate, and per-engine breakdown as results arrive. Keep recurring runs on to start building a trend.
What good looks like
A well-set-up project has:
- The brand name plus every variation customers and engines actually use.
- Three to five real competitors, the ones you'd lose a deal to.
- Five to ten prompts that reflect how customers ask, not how you describe yourself.
- Recurring runs turned on, so the numbers become a trend instead of a snapshot.
Common mistakes
Tracking only your exact brand name.Engines paraphrase and abbreviate. Miss the variations and you'll undercount your own mentions.
Adding aspirational competitors.Track who you actually compete with in answers, not the category giant, otherwise your Share of Voice looks bleak when it isn't.
Describing yourself instead of asking like a customer.Prompts should sound like real questions ("best X for Y"), not your tagline.