Onboarding, step by step

RankX AI onboarding is six steps: Website and business, brand and market, competitors, topic clusters, AI visibility prompts, and rank tracking keywords. Each arrives pre-filled from a scan of your homepage. The order is enforced on the server, because later steps read earlier answers, and completing the whole thing is what starts your trial.

Why the order cannot be skipped

Onboarding is not a form split across six screens. Three of the steps generate their suggestions from the answers you gave earlier, so a skipped step produces a worse suggestion rather than a faster setup:

• Competitors runs before topic clusters and before prompts, deliberately, because it is an input to both generators. Naming three real rivals here is the highest-value thirty seconds in the whole flow.
• Topic clusters run before prompts, because a prompt is attached to a cluster.
• Prompts run before keywords, so the two sets are proposed against a structure that already exists.

RankX AI enforces this server-side, so navigating straight to a later URL sends you back to the step you are actually on. That is a guard, not a bug.

Step 1: Website and business

This runs before a Website exists, which is why it has no progress marker of its own. You give RankX AI the domain, your company size and what you are trying to get out of the platform.

RankX AI then fetches and scans your homepage to build a first draft of your brand profile. This scan is platform-funded: it is part of the free onboarding package and does not draw on your credit balance. See the free trial for what the package covers and how it is granted.

Use the domain you actually want to track, with or without www. One free onboarding package is granted per verified root domain, ever, so a throwaway domain spends the entitlement.

Step 2: Brand and market

Confirm who the business is and where it operates. RankX AI has already guessed most of it from the scan; your job is to correct it.

The location fields here are the authoritative ones for the whole account, and the market you choose is what search and shopping checks are run in. If you never explicitly choose a market, RankX AI records that fact rather than pretending the default was a decision, and every downstream surface treats country and currency as defaults rather than facts about your business.

This step is also where your brand profile lives afterwards: audience, positioning, review standing and your service list. Everything generated later, from prompts to article drafts, reads it.

Step 3: Competitors

RankX AI proposes a competitor set from the scan and from your market. Accept the ones that are real rivals, remove the ones that are not, and add any it missed.

A competitor in RankX AI is a name plus a domain plus any aliases it trades under. That set is used in three places afterwards: the visibility comparison, the citation analysis, and the shopping merchant view. A competitor set full of directories and marketplaces makes all three less useful, so prune it.

Discovery typically takes ten to twenty seconds.

Step 4: Topic clusters

A topic cluster is a subject your business wants to be known for. It is the single grouping that keywords, tracked prompts and content all hang from, so it is worth getting roughly right rather than exactly right: clusters are editable afterwards and nothing is lost by renaming one.

RankX AI generates a candidate set from your brand profile and your competitors, which takes thirty to sixty seconds. Pick the clusters that match how you actually sell, not how the industry describes itself.

Step 5: AI visibility prompts

A prompt is a question RankX AI asks the assistants on your behalf, on a cadence, so it can record whether your brand gets named in the answer.

RankX AI writes a candidate list from your clusters and competitors, which takes fifteen to thirty seconds. Each prompt carries a buyer stage:

Two things worth knowing before you accept the list:

Every prompt you keep is a recurring cost. A prompt is checked on every assistant enabled for the Website, on every run, and each of those pairs is charged. Twenty-five prompts on five assistants is 125 checks per run, not twenty-five. Credits and metering sets out the arithmetic; the cost per check is in the credit cost reference.

Plans cap prompts per Website, and the cap is enforced by the database rather than by the interface, so a bulk add that exceeds it is refused rather than silently trimmed. The per-plan numbers are in plans and limits.

Step 6: Rank tracking keywords

The last step proposes keywords to track in ordinary Google results. Accept, edit, or add your own.

You can finish setup without adding any keywords, and the option to do so is on the screen. It is a real choice rather than a trap: AI visibility works without rank tracking. But AI Overview data is collected by the rank tracker on tracked keywords, not by the scheduled prompt run, so a Website with no tracked keywords will have an empty AI Overviews section and that is why.

What finishing does

Completing the last required step is a moment with three effects, and they all happen together:

1. Your trial starts. Seven days, with a credit grant, identical on every plan. Not at signup, here.
2. The trial credits land, which is what makes the next item possible.
3. The AI-visibility baseline is dispatched, checking every prompt you accepted on every assistant enabled for the Website. This is the first real data in the account.

Until the baseline finishes, the AI Visibility screens are legitimately empty. Your first week says what fills in when.

If onboarding was abandoned halfway

An account that signed up and stopped partway has no trial running, because the clock and the grant are both attached to completion rather than to signup. The remedy is to finish onboarding; nothing is lost and nothing needs resetting.

If that is your symptom, go to troubleshooting setup, which starts with exactly this case.