Run your first scan
Five steps. Five minutes. The Free plan lets you run one scan on one brand to see what the report looks like before you pay anything.
1. Sign up
Go to answertrace.com and create an account. Continue with Google, or click or sign up with email to use a work email and password. If you sign up with email, confirm the verification link we send before you can log in.
2. Add your brand URL
On the first screen after signup, paste the URL of the brand you want to measure. The most common shape is your homepage (https://yourbrand.com).
The brand setup overlay does two things:
- Crawls your site for the basics (title, meta, schema, llms.txt, FAQ structure)
- Detects your category, maps competitors and personas, and generates a starter prompt set
This usually takes about 30 seconds. You can watch the work happen in the overlay. Wikipedia, Wikidata, G2, Reddit, and press signals are pulled during the scan itself in step 4, not during this setup step.
3. Confirm the prompts
Once the brand is loaded, AnswerTrace proposes a question set drawn from your category and competitors. The default set has between 10 and 200 prompts depending on your plan.
You can:
- Approve the set as-is
- Add prompts you know your buyers ask
- Remove prompts that miss your positioning
- Edit a prompt before it runs
Take ten minutes here. The quality of the prompt set is what makes the report useful.
4. Launch the scan
Hit Run scan. The progress overlay shows each engine working in real time. A first scan typically takes 3 to 5 minutes for the headline number and up to ten minutes for the full diagnostic. Larger prompt packs on Pro can take longer.
You can close the tab and come back when it finishes.
5. Read the report
When the scan finishes, you land on the report. The left rail lets you jump between sections. The hero shows your overall AI Presence Score and the three-stage funnel (Discovery, Shortlist, Win).
See Read your first scan for a guided tour.
What this means for you
The first scan is your baseline. Everything you do later, every fix you ship, every competitor move, is measured against this snapshot. Re-running the same prompts each week is what makes the trend line meaningful.