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Audience Docs

Set up

Your website

Step 1 of setup. You give Scout one address, and it reads your public pages to learn what you sell, who you sell it to, and what you already rank for.

Step 1 asks for one thing: the address your customers visit. Everything Scout knows about your company starts here, so it reads the site before it says anything.

The page opens with the question Let's find what moves you forward. and a single field labelled Website address, with the placeholder example.com. The helper text says it plainly: The address your customers visit. Scout works out the rest. You do not need to add https://, a www, or a path.

What happens when you press "Start reading my site"

Two things start immediately, and both keep running in the background while you carry on with setup.

  • A read of your public pages. Scout crawls the site to learn what you sell, who you sell it to, how you describe yourselves, and what you have already written. This becomes the first version of your company profile and the starting point for your playbook.
  • A market baseline. Scout looks up what the domain already ranks for and who else ranks for the same searches. That is where the first list of competitors comes from, and it is the "before" picture your Reports measure against.

The same screen turns into a progress view showing both tasks. You can watch, or you can move on. The footer says so: Reading your site keeps going in the background. You do not have to wait for it.

If you typed the wrong address

Below the progress view is a disclosure labelled Wrong address?. Open it to enter the address again. Scout starts over with the new one.

Moving on

The footer button reads Next — connect your search data. Step 2 is where you connect Search Console, which is the single strongest signal Scout has.

Notes

  • One workspace is about one website. The workspace switcher shows the domain under the workspace name once a site exists.
  • Only owners and admins can add a website. Everyone else sees: Nobody has added a website yet. An owner or admin of this workspace needs to do that before Scout can start.
  • Scout reads public pages only. Anything your website does not say, such as who you never write for or claims you cannot make, belongs in step 3 or in the company profile later.