Setting up your first brand

Before you begin

Setting up your brand in Craawled takes about five minutes, and you'll have your first visibility data within the hour. Before you start, have two things ready: your brand's primary domain (the one you want tracked for citations) and a short description of what your brand does. The description helps the system match mentions accurately — it's especially important if your brand name is a common word or could be confused with other entities.

You'll also want to have a few queries in mind. These are the questions your potential customers might ask an AI assistant that should lead to your brand being mentioned. Don't overthink this at the start — you can always add, modify, or remove queries later. Three to five good queries are enough to get meaningful initial data.

Step 1: Create your brand in Settings

Navigate to the Settings page and select the Brand tab. Here you'll enter three pieces of information: your brand name (exactly as you want it tracked — capitalization matters for matching), your primary domain (e.g., yourbrand.com), and a brief description of your brand or product.

The domain field is particularly important because it's what Craawled uses to detect citations across AI platforms. When Perplexity or ChatGPT links to a source, Craawled checks whether that link points to your domain. Without it, you'd only get brand name mentions — with it, you get full citation tracking as well.

Step 2: Add target queries in Query Explorer

Head over to the Query Explorer and click the add button to create your first query. Type in a natural-language question that a real person might ask an AI assistant — something like "What are the best tools for managing remote teams?" rather than a keyword-stuffed phrase like "best remote team management tools 2026."

The distinction matters because AI platforms are conversational. Users ask them questions the way they'd ask a knowledgeable friend, and the platform's response is shaped by the phrasing of the question. A natural question tends to produce more representative results than a keyword string.

• Use conversational phrasing — "What's the best..." or "How do I..." rather than keyword lists
• Include comparison queries — "X vs Y" queries often trigger brand mentions
• Mix broad and specific — "best CRM software" alongside "best CRM for startups under 10 people"
• Think from your customer's perspective — what would they ask before making a purchase decision?
• Start with 3-5 queries and expand once you see initial results

Step 3: Launch your first crawl

Once your queries are in place, you can manually trigger a crawl or wait for the next scheduled one. During a crawl, Craawled sends each of your queries to every enabled AI platform — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — and captures the full response. The system then analyzes each response for brand mentions, citations, sentiment, and competitive mentions.

A typical crawl takes one to three minutes per query, depending on platform response times. You can monitor progress in real-time from the Query Explorer, where each query card shows the crawl status per platform. A green dot means the platform has responded and the response has been analyzed. A spinning indicator means the crawl is still in progress for that platform.

What happens after your first crawl

Once your first crawl completes, your dashboard will populate with initial metrics: your visibility rate, mention count, average sentiment, and any competitor mentions detected. Navigate to the Dashboard to see the full picture.

From here, Craawled runs crawls automatically every six hours, building up a historical dataset that shows your visibility trends over time. Within a week, you'll have enough data to spot patterns — which platforms mention you most, which queries perform best, and where your competitors are getting traction that you're not.

The most productive next step is to review your initial results, add any competitor brands you want to track, and refine your query list based on what you see. Queries where you have zero visibility aren't necessarily bad — they might represent your biggest growth opportunities.