Your first scan

What a scan does

A scan is DiscoveredBy running every one of your tracked prompts against every AI engine available on your plan, the same question a person could type into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Grok, except run through each engine's own API rather than a browser (see Engines and measurement). Each execution's full answer is saved, and whatever the engine cited or retrieved while composing that answer is recorded at the same time.

Working out whether that answer actually named your brand is a separate step that runs after the answer itself is collected. See How long before you see data below for what that means for what you can read on day one.

When scans run

The daily scan itself is not something you trigger. Once a day, a single scheduled job enqueues every active prompt, for every project on the platform, against every engine available on that project's plan. There is no separate daily mode for one kind of check and a weekly mode for another: every tracked prompt runs on the same daily cadence.

There is one exception. Accepting a prompt on Prompts → Suggestions immediately queues one run, on a single engine, for each country that prompt tracks: fast feedback, not the full scan described above, and it does not change when the daily job next runs for anything else. A prompt you type in during onboarding has no suggestion to accept, so it simply waits for the next daily run like everything else.

Your first scan happens at the next time that daily job runs after your prompts exist, which is at most a day away, not a wait measured in a set number of hours. It runs automatically. Beyond accepting a suggestion, there is nothing to start yourself, and nothing you need to leave open in your browser.

How long before you see data

The first thing to appear is whatever the scan collects directly: the engine's answer, and any citation or retrieval the engine reported while forming it (see Domain coverage and Citation rate). Those numbers are live as soon as that day's collection finishes.

Whether your brand was actually named in that answer takes one step longer. Reading an answer for mentions runs after collection, not as part of it, so brand visibility and the other mention-based numbers catch up a little behind citation rate and domain coverage rather than appearing at the same moment. Until that catch-up happens for a given day, expect no data rather than a zero: see How to read any number here for what that distinction means.

Related

• Onboarding: the setup that puts your prompts in place before the first scan
• Reading your first results: what to look at once data starts arriving
• Metrics defined: collected versus analysed answers, in full