Getting Started with Outrigger: Add a Brand and Review Your Baseline

When you first sign up for Outrigger, you'll set up your workspace. This is your top-level account that contains all your brands.

Your agency profile includes: - Agency name — your business name (e.g., "Xpand Digital") - Owner email — the primary contact for billing and admin - Logo — displayed in the dashboard header and brand reports

If you're a single brand (not an agency), just use your brand name as the workspace name. Outrigger works the same way either way — one workspace with one brand.

Click Brands in the sidebar, then Add brand. Choose Add brand manually to enter the details yourself and select Save brand and continue. You can instead choose Research my website to review suggested details from the site. Website research is optional; review its suggestions before saving.

Saving a brand records its details without starting an audit. Baseline setup and confirmation are separate steps.

During the review, pay particular attention to:

Brand Brief — This is the single most important field in Outrigger. Every AI-generated response, every classification decision, every audit scan uses this text. Write 2-3 paragraphs describing what the business does, who it serves, and what makes it different. Be specific. "We're a marketing agency" is useless. "We're a B2B SaaS content marketing agency that's generated $47M in pipeline for 200+ tech companies since 2019" is what you want.

Tone Guidelines — How should responses sound? Casual and helpful? Technical and authoritative? Include specific rules like "never use the word 'utilize'" or "always mention the free trial."

Target Audience — Who are you trying to reach? The more specific, the better the AI can craft responses that resonate.

Competitors and differentiators — Confirm which alternatives matter and what makes this brand different. These details help Outrigger interpret the audit and prepare relevant work.

Keywords are the fuel for Outrigger's discovery engine. They determine which Reddit threads, Quora questions, and Facebook Group discussions get surfaced.

During setup: Enter the keywords yourself. If you choose optional website research, review its suggestions and edit the list before continuing.

After setup: Open Brands, choose the brand, then open Keywords. Select Add keywords to paste one keyword per line.

Tips for great keywords: - Focus on buying-intent terms: "best [product category]", "[product] alternatives", "[product] vs [competitor]" - Include question-format keywords: "how to choose a [product]", "is [product type] worth it" - Add competitor comparison keywords: "[competitor] alternative", "[competitor] vs [your brand]" - Don't go too broad. "Marketing" is useless. "B2B SaaS content marketing agency" finds the right threads.

Each keyword can be tagged with categories and assigned to specific platforms (Reddit, Quora, Facebook Groups). By default, all platforms are enabled.

Saving a brand does not start a baseline audit. Continue to Review baseline, check the brand details, keywords, sources and available collection options, then select Start baseline audit only when the setup is ready. If a required option is unavailable, resolve it before starting. The full audit checks six pillars to measure current AI visibility.

The audit usually takes several minutes and checks six evidence areas:

1. Citations — How many high-authority forum threads mention your brand vs competitors
2. AI Presence — Whether supported AI providers recommend you
3. Entities — Whether your brand identity is consistent across platforms AI models reference
4. Reviews — Your verified review profiles and available review evidence
5. On-Page — Whether the website exposes current, citable information
6. Press — Your earned media footprint and authority signals

If a source cannot be verified, Outrigger marks the baseline as partial instead of inventing an overall score. The audit also generates a prioritized action plan from the evidence it could verify.

Read the full breakdown in The AI Visibility Audit.

After the audit, your dashboard populates with data. Here's where to go next:

Citation Engine — Your daily working screen. This shows all discovered threads where you can place your brand. Start by generating responses for the highest-scoring threads.

AI Monitor — Set up monitoring prompts to track whether AI models start mentioning your brand over time. This is your north-star metric.

Reports — View your audit results, export PDF reports for clients, and track month-over-month progress.

Recommended first actions: 1. Review your audit action plan — it tells you exactly what to do first 2. Go to Citation Engine and generate responses for your top 5 threads 3. Set up 5-10 monitoring prompts in AI Monitor

Return to This Week for the next evidence-backed actions. Outrigger keeps external posting under human control: review and edit any prepared response before you post it yourself.