The Dashboard
One Website's whole state on one screen. The Needs Attention feed, the twelve cards and which of them you can hide, and why a new account is mostly empty.
The Dashboard is the summary of one Website. It carries a Needs Attention feed that merges findings from every subsystem into one ranked list, and a set of cards that each summarise a screen elsewhere in RankX AI. Every card links to the screen behind it, so the Dashboard is a starting point rather than a place to work.
Two things about it surprise people, and both are deliberate: most of it is empty on day one, and Needs Attention is the one card nobody can hide.
Needs Attention comes first
Needs Attention is the reason the Dashboard exists. It merges what six parts of RankX AI have found into a single ranked list, so "what should I do about this Website today" has one answer rather than six screens.
| Source | What it contributes |
|---|---|
| Onboarding | Setup that has not been finished |
| Content | Generations that failed and can be retried, drafts scoring below par, and briefs waiting to be approved |
| Website Audit | An audit that did not complete, your top open issue with the pages it affects, and audits that keep failing intermittently |
| AI Prompts | A visibility check that has gone stale, or has never run |
| Tasks | High-priority work the actions engine has surfaced |
| Billing | A paused schedule, with the reason and the right screen to fix it |
Each item carries a severity, and the severity is derived from where the item ranked at merge time rather than from which subsystem produced it. That is what lets a critical audit finding and a critical billing block look the same to you, which is correct: they are equally in your way.
When onboarding is incomplete, that single fact is the only item shown. A half-configured Website produces "0%" and "no data" from every other subsystem, and those are not problems, they are the expected state of an unfinished setup. Listing them would bury the one thing that actually needs doing.
A condition already shown on a card stands down from the feed. Intermittent audit failures are the current example: the Site Health card states it and carries the remedy, so the feed does not repeat it.
Hide that card and the item comes back. The signal is never lost, only de-duplicated while something else is saying it. Which surface owns a condition is a decision written down in both places rather than a fall-through, so no condition can end up owned by neither.
The twelve cards
| Card | What it summarises |
|---|---|
| Needs Attention | Everything across the product that needs a decision from you |
| Who AI recommends | Share of AI answers naming each brand, and where you rank among them |
| Average Ranking Position | Your average Google position across tracked keywords |
| AI Overviews | How many of your keywords Google answers itself, above the results |
| AI Overview Citations | How often Google's AI Overview cites your site, over time |
| Site Health Score | Your latest audit score and its biggest open issue |
| Search Traffic | Clicks and impressions from Search Console |
| Website Visitors | Visitors and sessions from Google Analytics |
| Rank Tracking | Your tracked keywords and how they moved |
| AI Visibility Prompts | The questions being tracked, and whether you appear in the answers |
| Recent AI Chats | Real answers AI assistants gave about your market |
| Content Summary | Your article pipeline and what needs review |
Choosing which cards you see
Eleven of the twelve can be hidden, from Settings, then Dashboard. The choice is yours and it is per person: hiding a card changes your own screen and nobody else's.
Needs Attention cannot be hidden. It is the one card whose whole job is to tell you something is wrong, and a dashboard you can configure into saying nothing is a dashboard that stops being trustworthy.
On an agency account there is a second mechanism, and the order between them matters. An agency's permissions are applied first, and your preferences cannot undo them. A client user whose agency has switched off content access does not get the Content Summary card back by editing their own settings. Preferences are curation; permissions are policy, and running them the other way round would turn a personal convenience into a way around an agency's decision.
If your stored preferences cannot be read for any reason, RankX AI shows the default dashboard rather than a blank one. Curation fails open; access does not.
A new Website is mostly empty, and that is correct
Everything RankX AI measures itself starts on the day it first measured it, because none of it can be backfilled at any price. Nobody can ask ChatGPT what it said about your brand last month, and Google does not sell June's positions. So AI visibility, rank tracking, AI Shopping and the audit all begin empty, and a new Website shows a setup checklist rather than a wall of zeroes. Its five steps are derived from what is actually in your account rather than from a flag somebody ticked once:
- Confirm your brand profile
- Add prompts to track
- Add competitors to compare against
- Track your first keywords
- Connect Google Search Console
The checklist recomputes on every visit, so a Website that was set up in a hurry keeps being nudged rather than being marked done for ever.
The two Google cards are the exception, because Search Console and Analytics hold history of their own. Connecting them starts a backfill of up to 16 months, so Search Traffic and Website Visitors can show a year of trend while every card beside them is still empty and correctly so. The two limits differ in kind and it is worth knowing which is which: 16 months is Search Console's own ceiling, and asking for more returns nothing; for Analytics it is RankX AI's choice, matched to how long RankX AI keeps the rows rather than to anything Google refuses.
Where a card is waiting on a scheduled run, it says when that run happens rather than showing an empty chart. That date is read from the same cadence logic the scheduler keeps, including any floor your plan or your trial applies, so the promise the Dashboard makes and the schedule the job keeps cannot drift. A card only makes the promise when it can guarantee it: a Website checked outside the current window says nothing rather than quoting a date that could be wrong by a month.
See your first week for what appears when, and null is not zero for why an empty card is not a score of nought.
What the Dashboard is not
It is not a report. Nothing on it is designed to be sent to a client. For that, use client reports or a share link.
It is not the place to work. Every card is a summary with a link. The ranked list of things to do is the Tasks board, which is where findings become work with steps and a definition of done.
It is not available on free access. After a trial ends the Dashboard is one of the paywalled sections, because almost everything it summarises is metered work that has stopped. See free access after the trial for what stays open.
Where to go next
- Tasks, where the Needs Attention feed leads.
- Settings, for the card chooser and everything else.
- Your first week, for what fills in when.
- Metrics defined, for what each number on a card means.
Last updated
Websites, workspaces and accounts
RankX AI's object model in one page. What a Website is, what a Client Workspace is, what belongs to which, and the vocabulary used throughout these docs.
AI Visibility
How RankX AI measures whether the six tracked AI assistants name your brand, and what each screen in the AI Visibility section is for.