Quick start

Overview

This guide walks you from zero to your first meaningful result in Obsurfable: seeing how an AI answer engine responds to questions about your brand.

The entire first session typically takes 15–30 minutes. You'll create an account, teach Obsurfable about your company, and run a prompt retrieval that shows mentions, citations, and competitor presence.

Who it's for

This quick start is for anyone new to Obsurfable:

• First-time users evaluating AI visibility for their brand.
• Marketers setting up a new company workspace.
• Teams who want a fast baseline before committing to Pro.

If you want the big picture first, read What is Obsurfable?.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, gather:

• Your company name and website URL.
• 3–5 keywords your buyers search for.
• 2–3 use cases or outcomes your product delivers.
• Main competitors AI might recommend instead of you.

Optional: sitemap URL and llms.txt location — you can add these later in Setup.

Step-by-step guide

1. Create your free account

Go to app.obsurfable.com/signup?plan=free and sign up. The free plan lets you complete onboarding and run prompt retrievals with no credit card required.

After sign-up, you'll land in the onboarding flow automatically.

2. Complete onboarding

Onboarding has multiple steps designed to capture the context AI needs to generate relevant prompts and recommendations. Expect to cover:

1. Company basics — Name, website URL, and foundational details. Obsurfable may capture a screenshot of your site for reference.
2. Market and stage — Company stage, team size, and business type.
3. What you do — Overview of your product or service.
4. Goals — What you want from AI visibility (mentions, citations, competitive positioning).
5. Growth and traffic — How you acquire customers today.
6. Pain points and confidence — Where you feel strong or weak in AI discovery.
7. Keywords, use cases, and competitors — The inputs that power prompt generation.

Tip: Don't skip keywords, use cases, or competitors — they directly determine which questions Obsurfable monitors for you.

When onboarding finishes, you'll have a company profile and auto-generated company prompts ready for retrieval.

3. Land on your dashboard

After onboarding, open the Dashboard — your central hub organized into Setup, Monitor, Act, and Discover workflows. See Dashboard for a full tour.

You may see:

• Visibility score — A snapshot of mentions, citations, and competitive gaps.
• Setup health — Checklist of brand context items still to complete.
• First-run checklist — Guided next steps including your first prompt run.

4. Review your company prompts

Navigate to Prompts from the Monitor section (or go to /prompts in the app).

Obsurfable generates company prompts from your keywords and use cases — questions a buyer might ask AI in your category. On the free plan you can have up to 50 active prompts.

Open Company prompts (/prompts/company) to review, edit, archive, or add prompts before running them.

5. Run your first prompt retrieval

From Prompts, start a new run or open an existing prompt to retrieve:

1. Select one or more company prompts to run.
2. Click Retrieve (or equivalent run action) to send the prompts to the AI retrieval pipeline.
3. Wait for results — each prompt returns how the AI answered, whether your brand was mentioned, which URLs were cited, and which competitors appeared.

On the free plan, each prompt can be run once. Re-runs and web search during retrieval require Pro.

6. Read your results

For each prompt result, look for:

• Brand mention — Did the AI name your company?
• URL citations — Did it link to your pages or only competitors/third parties?
• Answer quality — Is the response accurate about what you do?
• Competitor presence — Who else was recommended?

This baseline tells you where to focus next: content gaps, missing comparison pages, weak FAQ coverage, or competitor displacement.

7. Decide your next move

Tips

• Run 3–5 diverse prompts first — Mix definitional ("What is X?"), comparative ("X vs Y"), and use-case ("best tool for Z") questions.
• Complete Setup health items — Adding sitemap, llms.txt, and competitors improves every downstream feature.
• Use annotations — Save notes on surprising results directly in the app for your team.
• Don't expect instant ranking changes — AI visibility improves as you publish and structure content; re-measure after meaningful site updates.
• Free plan is a snapshot — Pro unlocks re-runs, insights, and automation so you can track progress over time.

FAQ

How long does onboarding take?

Most users finish in 15–20 minutes. You can pause and return — progress is saved per step. If you rush through keywords and competitors, prompt quality will suffer, so invest a few extra minutes there.

What happens on the free plan after my first prompt run?

Each company prompt can be retrieved once on Free. You keep access to your dashboard, company profile, and results. To re-run prompts, enable web search on retrievals, or unlock Insights and Query trees, upgrade to Pro. See Plans and features.

I don't see any prompts yet — what should I do?

Ensure onboarding is complete and you have at least a few keywords and use cases saved. Prompts are generated from that context. You can also add prompts manually from the Company prompts page.

Where do I go after my first retrieval?

Open the Dashboard and follow the first-run checklist. Explore Workflows to understand Setup, Monitor, Act, and Discover — the four phases of an AI visibility program.