Days 1–7: foundation week
Week one is about getting the brand fully into the platform and capturing the baseline. Don't try to move the score yet. The goal is a clean foundation.
Day 1: onboard by URL
In your authorized workspace, start the new-brand workflow with the homepage URL. Review the suggested brief, keywords, monitor prompts, and competitors, then confirm the setup. Check any offered audit step separately; completion time varies and research does not mean an audit has finished.
While it runs, do nothing. Watch the progress overlay finish.
Day 2: tighten the brief
Open the new client. Spend 15 minutes editing:
- Brand brief: make sure the differentiator language is specific. "We help small businesses grow" is useless. "We provide commercial laundry services for hospitals in these verified service areas" is what response generation needs.
- Tone guidelines: one or two sentences on voice. Casual? Authoritative? Founder-led?
- Response rules: anything that must never be said. ("Never mention pricing." "Never claim to be a customer.")
- URLs to mention: the one or two URLs the AI is allowed to drop into citations.
This is the highest-leverage 15 minutes of the whole 90 days. Every generated response, every press pitch, and every citation is grounded in this text.
Day 3: read the baseline audit
The audit completes within an hour of onboarding. Open the audit detail page and read it end to end.
Note three things:
- The composite score (your starting line).
- The weakest pillar (where the easiest 10 points live).
- The top three actions in the AI-generated action plan.
Don't act on them yet. You're still calibrating.
Day 4: run keyword research
Open /dashboard/research/keywords. Drop the most important seed keyword for the brand. Let it run.
When it finishes, look for clusters where competitors are mentioned and your brand is not. Promote the top 5 clusters to monitor prompts in one click. These will become your Share of Model leading indicator.
Day 5: set up competitor tracking
In Sonar, go to Competitors. Add the 3–5 brands that show up most often in keyword research. The agent and the audit pipeline both use this list.
Day 6: set up two alert rules
Open /dashboard/monitor/alerts. Two rules to start:
- SoM drop >10% week-over-week → Slack channel
- New competitor gap with high traffic estimate → email
That's enough. Don't over-alert in week 1.
Day 7: first citation run (read-only)
In Citations, kick off a discovery scan with your active keywords. Don't seed anything yet. Just let the platform fill the queue so you have something to work with on Day 8.