Quickstart
Sign up, add your first Website, complete the six onboarding steps, and read your first AI visibility numbers. What happens at each step, and when.
Getting from an empty account to real numbers takes six guided steps and one overnight run. Sign up, add your Website, work through onboarding, and the first full AI-visibility baseline is collected when you finish. Ordinary rank data and Google AI Overview data arrive on the first scheduled check after that.
The one thing worth knowing before you start: your free trial does not begin at signup. It starts when the onboarding package finishes. A signup that abandons onboarding halfway has no trial running, which is the single most common source of "why do I have no credits". The free trial explains why it works that way.
Before you begin
You need three things, and none of them is a credit card:
- A live website with a domain you control. RankX AI fetches your homepage during setup, so it has to be reachable.
- A rough idea of who you compete with. Two or three names is enough; RankX AI suggests more.
- Ten minutes. Onboarding is six steps and each one is short, but skipping ahead is not possible: the order is enforced on the server, because later steps use earlier answers as input.
The steps, in order
Create your account
Sign up at app.rankxai.com. Pick the track that fits: Direct if you are one business, Agency if you report to clients. Choosing your track covers the difference, and it is worth two minutes now because moving between tracks later is a support conversation.
Add your first Website
Give RankX AI the domain, the company size and what you want out of the platform. A Website in RankX AI is one site you track, and it is the unit almost everything else hangs off: prompts, keywords, audits and reports are all scoped to one Website.
RankX AI then scans your homepage and builds a first draft of your brand profile from it. This is platform-funded, so it costs you nothing and does not touch your credit balance.
Work through the six onboarding steps
Brand and market, competitors, topic clusters, AI visibility prompts, and rank tracking keywords. Each step arrives pre-filled with suggestions generated from the scan, and each is editable.
Competitors deliberately comes before topic clusters and prompts, because the generators for both read your competitor set. Answer it properly and the two steps after it get noticeably better.
Onboarding, step by step walks through each screen and what it asks for.
Finish, and let the baseline run
Completing onboarding does three things at once: it starts your trial clock, grants your trial credits, and dispatches a baseline AI-visibility check across every prompt you accepted, on every assistant enabled for the Website.
That baseline takes a few minutes for a small prompt set and longer for a large one. It is the first real data in the account, and until it lands the AI Visibility screens are empty.
Read the first numbers correctly
Two rules before you draw any conclusion from what you see:
A rate always divides by checks with a known verdict, so a missing rate means unknown rather than zero. And a single run of a single prompt is not a measurement: the value is in the rate across a panel of prompts over time. Null is not zero is the page that makes this concrete, and it is the most useful ten minutes in these docs.
Connect what you have
Two optional connections make the rest of the platform much more useful:
WordPress, if your site runs on it, unlocks publishing, metadata writes and the fix-application path from the Tasks board. Every write is verified by reading the object back, and page-builder pages are refused rather than damaged. See the WordPress integration.
MCP, if you want to drive RankX AI from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or a script. This is RankX AI's programmatic interface, and it is the strongest thing in the product. See the MCP server.
What happens next, and when
| When | What arrives |
|---|---|
| At the end of onboarding | The AI-visibility baseline, across every accepted prompt on every enabled assistant |
| The next scheduled run | Ordinary Google positions for your tracked keywords, and AI Overview data collected alongside them |
| On your cadence after that | The scheduled AI-visibility run. RankX AI looks nightly at 02:00 UTC and runs the Websites that are due |
| When you start one | The Website Audit, which is dispatched rather than instant and takes minutes to crawl |
| Two to three days after connecting | Search Console data, because Google publishes on a delay at source |
While you are on trial, every scheduled check family runs at most once every seven days, on every plan. That is not a throttle applied to you; it is what makes the trial grant last long enough to show you a second measurement. See the free trial.
Your first week sets out the same timeline day by day, and names the screens that are legitimately empty at each point.
If something looks wrong
Most first-day surprises are one of four things: the trial has not started
because onboarding was abandoned, a screen is empty because the run that fills it
has not happened yet, a Google connection is not returning numbers because it is
not ready, or a rate is blank because no check has a known verdict yet.
Troubleshooting setup works through each one with the symptom first.
Choosing your track
RankX AI ships as a Direct track for one business and an Agency track for firms serving clients. Which to pick, and what changes if you pick wrong.
Onboarding, step by step
The six onboarding steps in RankX AI, what each one asks for, why the order is enforced, and what completing it starts.