Add your first project

A project represents exactly one domain or property. Everything in VisibilityIQ — audits, raw-vs-rendered parity, rank tracking, competitor intel, and the connectors that pull in Search Console and GA4 data — is scoped to a single project. One domain, one project. Keep example.com and blog.example.com as separate projects if you treat them as separate properties.

What you’ll need

• A verified account and an active sign-in session (Create your account if you haven’t)
• The root URL of the site you want to audit, live and publicly reachable (not behind a login wall, VPN, or staging password)
• An available domain slot — your plan includes 2; if both are used, add another first (Adding domains)

Create a project

1. Sign in and open your dashboard.
2. Click New project.
3. Enter your domain — example.com is enough; you don’t need to type https:// or a trailing slash. Use the canonical host you actually serve (if you redirect www to the apex, enter the apex).
4. Give the project a recognizable name. This is what shows in the project switcher, so “Acme Marketing Site” beats “Project 1”.
5. Click Create.

Before the project is saved, VisibilityIQ confirms the domain resolves and responds. If validation fails, the most common causes are a typo in the host, a site that’s down, or a server that blocks unknown crawlers at the WAF. Confirm the URL loads in a private browser window, then retry.

What happens on creation

Once the project exists, VisibilityIQ queues an initial crawl automatically. The crawler fetches each page twice — once as raw HTML and once as a fully rendered page after JavaScript executes — so it can diff the two and flag render-parity problems. A first crawl typically finishes in 5–15 minutes; large sites take longer. You can watch live progress (pages discovered, fetched, and audited) on the project dashboard. You don’t have to wait at the screen — findings populate as the run proceeds.

While that runs, the highest-value next move is connecting your Google data so findings get reconciled against what Google actually indexed and which canonical it selected. Without that connection the crawler still produces a complete audit, but it can only report what your pages declare — it can’t tell you when Google quietly overrode a canonical or dropped a page you intended to index. Connecting Search Console early means your very first audit already carries that reconciliation, rather than waiting for a later crawl.

One project per domain

Because a project carries its own crawl settings, connector tokens, keyword set, and audit history, mixing two domains into one project would corrupt all of that. If you manage multiple sites, create a project for each — they all live under your organization and share your billing.

Next steps

• Connect Google Search Console
• Reading your audit results
• Adding domains