Quick Start Guide

Get Your First Insights in 5 Minutes

This guide walks you through setting up AEO Optima from sign-up to your first AI visibility snapshot. By the end, you'll have real data showing how AI engines represent your brand.

---

Step 1: Sign Up or Log In

Visit the AEO Optima app and create your account. You can sign up with:

• Google — One-click sign-in with your Google account
• Email and password — Traditional email registration

After signing up, the onboarding wizard walks you through creating your organization and first project — you name them yourself in the first two steps.

Tip: If you've been invited to join an existing organization, your pending invitation appears right on the onboarding page — you can accept or decline it there instead of creating a new organization.

---

Step 2: Complete the Onboarding Wizard

The onboarding wizard is an eight-step flow: Organization → Project → Define your brand → Prompts → AI Models & Surfaces → Configure → Capture Your Baseline → All Set. Every step after the first two can be skipped and finished later.

The Define your brand step is where the wizard earns its keep. On plans with Query Universe (Pro-Individual and above), the platform analyzes your own website — up to 6 pages — and proposes your industry, categories, certifications, target segments, and competitors, each backed by a quote from your site; you apply only the items you confirm. On Free and Starter, a compact manual form captures the same things. See Setup Wizard for the full step-by-step.

Project Information

• Brand Name — Enter your company or product name exactly as you want it tracked (e.g., "Acme Corp" or "Acme"). This is the name AEO Optima will look for in AI responses.
• Website URL — Your primary website (e.g., https://www.acme.com). Used for page analysis, AEO scoring, and the automatic Define step.

---

Step 3: Choose AI Models & Surfaces

AEO Optima queries multiple AI engines to give you a comprehensive view of your brand's visibility. In the wizard's AI Models & Surfaces step, pick the chat models you want to monitor — and the search-embedded AI surfaces (Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode, captured natively by AEO Optima's own browser).

New projects come pre-configured with one recommended chat model per provider (flagship providers first, capped at your plan's daily snapshot limit), so you can simply confirm the defaults. Models are loaded dynamically from the platform's model registry — you'll see the latest available models grouped by provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, and more). Selections save automatically and can be changed anytime in Settings → AI Surfaces.

You can use the platform's managed API access or bring your own API keys (BYOK) for any supported provider under Settings → API Keys.

Note: Each model you enable will be queried for every prompt during a snapshot. More models means broader coverage but higher API usage.

---

Step 4: Add Your First Prompts

Prompts are the questions AEO Optima sends to AI models on your behalf. Think of them as the queries your potential customers are asking AI chatbots.

Add 3 to 5 prompts to start — typed in one at a time or imported from CSV. Good prompts are questions a real customer would type into ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. On Query Universe plans, once the Define step is applied, a "Suggested from your definition" card offers ready-made prompts composed from your confirmed definition.

Example Prompts

Tip: Start with broad, category-level prompts like "What is the best [your category]?" and "Can you recommend a [your product type]?" These give you the widest view of where your brand stands. You can add more specific prompts later.

---

Step 5: Capture Your Baseline

A snapshot is a point-in-time capture of how AI models respond to your prompts. The wizard's Capture Your Baseline step runs your first capture across all active prompts and selected models, with live progress — this becomes the Share-of-Model baseline your later trend data compares against.

When you finish the baseline step, the recurring schedule you configured is created. If you captured a baseline, the schedule's first automatic run follows its cadence; if you skipped the baseline, one first capture is queued automatically so your project isn't empty.

You can also capture manually at any time:

1. Navigate to Snapshots in the sidebar
2. Click New Snapshot
3. Select the prompts and models you want to include (or use the defaults)
4. Click Capture

The system will query each selected AI model with each of your prompts and record the responses. This typically takes 30 seconds to a few minutes depending on the number of prompt-model combinations.

---

Step 6: View Your Results

Once the snapshot completes, head to the Dashboard to see your results:

• Mention Rate — The percentage of AI responses that mention your brand
• Average Rank Position — Where your brand appears in AI-generated lists
• Sentiment Score — How positively AI engines describe you
• Engine Comparison — Side-by-side view of your visibility across different AI models (via the LLM Performance chart)

You can also drill into individual snapshot responses to read exactly what each AI model said.

---

What's Next?

Now that you have your first data, here are recommended next steps:

• Add more prompts — Expand your coverage with competitor-specific and long-tail queries
• Review your capture schedule — The wizard created a recurring schedule if you enabled one; tune its cadence (or add more schedules) under Schedules
• Invite your team — Add colleagues to your organization under Settings > Team
• Run a Page Analysis — Score your key landing pages for AI-readiness using the AEO Analyzer
• Review spend — Open Run schedule & cost → Spend to see what your captures cost

Learn More

• Core Concepts — Understand the key terminology
• Roles & Permissions — Set up team access levels
• Dashboard — Explore your visibility metrics in depth