The scan setup flow

After you create a Site, Onsomble takes you through a few short steps to set up its first scan: who you’re compared against, what questions get asked, and which AI assistants answer them. Every step starts with sensible choices already filled in from your business profile, so you can move fast or slow down and adjust. Nothing happens until you launch at the end, and you can go back and change an earlier step at any point.

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Step 1: Competitors

Choose the brands you want to be compared against. During a scan, Onsomble asks AI assistants questions about your industry and checks how often they mention you compared to these brands. That comparison is what your Share of Voice and competitive ranking are based on. Onsomble suggests a starting list from your business profile. Review it and make it accurate:

• Add anyone missing. Type a name into the search box. You know who you actually compete with better than any suggestion does.
• Remove anyone that doesn’t belong. A brand that isn’t really a rival just adds noise to your results.
• Select Rediscover for a fresh set of suggestions if the starting list is thin.

Aim for three to seven competitors: enough for a meaningful comparison, without making the results hard to read. You can change this list before any future scan, so it doesn’t need to be perfect now. Select Set up your prompts to continue.

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Step 2: Prompts

Prompts are the questions Onsomble asks AI assistants during a scan. Whatever the assistant says back is what gets measured: whether it recommends you, a competitor, or someone else entirely. Prompts decide what a scan is actually testing, so they’re worth getting right. Onsomble writes a starting set from your business profile, grouped into four types so you get a mix of questions instead of ten versions of the same one:

• Comparison: a head-to-head question, like “Allbirds vs Nike for everyday wear”. Shows where you stand against a named rival.
• Recommendation: an open question from someone who hasn’t chosen yet, like “best running shoes for beginners”. Shows whether you get recommended at all.
• Specific: a question about one particular product or feature you offer.
• General: a broader question about your industry or category.

Review the list and make it sound like your customers:

• Edit any prompt so it reads like a real question, not a generated one.
• Remove ones that miss the mark, and use Add Prompt to write your own.
• The strongest prompts are the questions a customer asks right before they decide. If you’re setting this up for a client, a five-minute conversation with them usually turns up prompts you’d never have written on your own.

This screen is a review of what got generated. For what actually drives it — the strategy inputs, how the number of prompts is decided, and how each one gets its category — see How prompt generation works. Select Choose models to continue.

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Step 3: Models

Choose which AI assistants the scan asks. Each one answers differently, so asking a mix gives you a fuller picture than relying on just one. Models come in two groups, App models and API models. They can run on the same AI underneath, but they’re two different ways your customers actually run into AI, and doing well in one doesn’t mean you do well in the other.

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App models

These are the assistants someone opens and talks to directly: the ChatGPT app, the Gemini app, Perplexity, Google’s AI answers, Copilot. This is a person sitting down and asking an AI assistant for a recommendation in their own words. These apps add their own layer on top of the AI underneath: live web browsing, their own instructions, their own way of choosing sources. So an app’s answer can differ from the raw AI’s answer, and it reflects what’s on the web right now. Scanning app models shows how you look to a customer using AI directly.

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API models

These are the same AI engines (the ones behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity) used by other companies to power features in their own products. When a retailer’s shopping assistant, a comparison site, or a chatbot on someone else’s website answers a question, it’s usually one of these underneath. Scanning API models shows how you look everywhere AI has quietly been built into other products, not just when a customer opens an assistant themselves. As more apps and websites add AI features, this is a growing share of where people actually run into recommendations.

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Choosing a mix

Turn on the assistants your customers actually use, from either group. The usage figure next to each one is there to help you judge where visibility matters most. Every model you add makes the scan broader, but also longer and a bigger draw on your plan’s scan allowance, so pick a considered mix rather than everything at once. Select Review your scan to continue.

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Step 4: Review and launch

The last step lays out the whole scan in one place: how often it runs, who it compares you against, what it asks, and which assistants it asks. This is your last chance to see the real size of the run before it starts. At the top, choose How often the scan repeats. A one-off scan is available to everyone. Recurring scans (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) are part of paid plans, so trends build up automatically over time — see Schedule for how that works. When it looks right, select the launch button at the bottom to run it. It starts immediately and takes you to a progress view — there’s no separate confirmation step.

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After you launch

The scan runs in the background. The Site’s insights pages show a progress banner and fill in as soon as it finishes. After that, you make any of these same changes from the Scan Settings group in the Site’s sidebar, and they apply from the next scan onward.

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What’s next