Getting started: your first 30 minutes

This is the whole onboarding journey on one page: twelve steps from an empty account to a connected, scheduled, self-verifying audit. Each step says what to click, what you’ll see, and why it matters. You don’t have to do all twelve in one sitting — but if you have half an hour, you can get through every one and come out the other side with a real audit, four data sources connected, first-party field data flowing, and your first guided fix applied.

Work top to bottom. Steps 1 and 2 stand alone and take five minutes. Steps 3–7 connect your data sources and can be done in any order (or skipped and added later). Steps 8–12 are the loop you’ll repeat for the life of the project: read, fix, verify, schedule.

flowchart LR
  A[1-2 Add site<br/>+ first crawl] --> B[3-7 Connect data<br/>GSC · GA4 · Bing<br/>CrUX · the tag]
  B --> C[8-9 Read top issues<br/>+ apply a guided fix]
  C --> D[10 Re-crawl<br/>to verify]
  D --> E[11-12 AI-bot access<br/>+ schedule]
  D -.->|repeat the loop| C

You don’t have to track this by hand

Every project’s Overview page shows a Getting started checklist at the top that tracks these steps for you automatically — it ticks each one off from your project’s real state (crawl run, each data source connected, tag verified, findings reviewed) and shows your progress (for example, 5 of 8 steps complete). Each unfinished step has a button that takes you straight to the action.

The checklist appears until your project is fully set up, then collapses so it stops nagging finished projects. If you collapsed or dismissed it and want it back, click Show checklist on the Overview page. Use this page as the detailed walkthrough; use the in-product checklist as your at-a-glance tracker.

Step 1 — Add your site (create a project)

What you click. Sign in and open your dashboard. Click New project, enter your domain (example.com — no https://, no trailing slash needed), give it a recognizable name, and click Create.

What you’ll see. VisibilityIQ confirms the domain resolves and responds, then saves the project and drops you on its dashboard. If validation fails, it’s almost always a typo in the host, a site that’s down, or a WAF blocking unknown crawlers — load the URL in a private browser window and retry.

Why it matters. A project is the container for everything that follows: crawl settings, connectors, keywords, and audit history, all scoped to one domain. One domain, one project — keep example.com and blog.example.com separate if you treat them as separate properties.

Full detail: Add your first project →

Step 2 — Run your first crawl

What you click. On the project dashboard, click Start Crawl (it reads Run audit on later runs). The first project also queues an initial crawl automatically on creation, so you may find one already running.

What you’ll see. The button switches to an In progress state and a progress panel appears, updating roughly every 30 seconds with pages discovered, fetched, and audited. The crawler fetches every page twice — once as raw HTML and once as a fully rendered page after JavaScript runs — so it can diff the two. A few hundred pages typically finish in 5–15 minutes. When it completes, the audit overview populates with an SEO score and issue counts by severity (Critical → High → Medium → Low → Info).

Why it matters. This raw-vs-rendered double crawl is the whole point: it catches the problems that only exist after JavaScript runs — a canonical swapped in by a framework, a noindex injected on the client, content a non-JS crawler never sees. A realistic page count and a spread of findings means it worked. A count of 0 or one page means the crawler was blocked or the site is behind auth — treat that as incomplete, not clean, and see Audit shows no data.

Full detail: Run your first audit →

Step 3 — Connect Google Search Console

What you click. Open Settings → Connectors, click Connect next to Google Search Console, and complete the one-click Sign in with Google consent screen using the account that holds Owner or Full User access to the property. Grant the requested read-only permission.

What you’ll see. The connector flips to Connected and the first sync starts immediately, pulling up to the last 16 months of search analytics. Within a few minutes your findings begin carrying clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position per page, plus Google’s selected canonical and index coverage.

Why it matters. Your crawler tells you what your pages declare; Search Console tells you what Google decided. The gap between the two — a canonical you declared that Google overrode, a page you meant to index that Google dropped — produces the highest-value, source-reconciled findings the platform makes. Connect this one first.

Full detail: Google Search Console connector →

Step 4 — Connect Google Analytics 4

What you click. In the same Settings → Connectors screen, click Connect next to Google Analytics 4 and complete the one-click Sign in with Google flow with an account that has Viewer access (or higher) to the property.

What you’ll see. Once connected, findings start carrying landing-page sessions, engaged sessions, conversions, and revenue (for e-commerce), and the engine begins weighting issues by real business impact — the same defect ranks higher on a page earning thousands of engaged sessions than on one nobody visits.

Pick the right property — the common GA4 mistake

Choose the GA4 property for the marketing/content site you’re auditing, not an app, auth, or admin-dashboard property. Many teams run several GA4 properties under one Google account; connecting the wrong one fills your weighting with traffic from a property that has nothing to do with the pages being crawled, and your findings will look mis-prioritized. If the landing pages in your traffic data don’t match the URLs in your crawl, you picked the wrong property — disconnect and reconnect the right one.

Why it matters. GA4 is what turns the audit from a checklist into a triage tool. It doesn’t change a finding’s technical severity; it changes its priority by telling VisibilityIQ which findings move money.

Full detail: Google Analytics 4 connector →

Step 5 — Connect Bing Webmaster

What you click. In Settings → Connectors, find the Bing Webmaster card, paste your Bing Webmaster API key, confirm the Site URL matches the site you verified in Bing, and click Save, then Get data.

What you’ll see. Bing search performance, sitemap status, site diagnostics, and index coverage flow in on a weekly cadence. Your key is stored encrypted and never shown again.

Why it matters. Bing isn’t a Google clone — its index and crawler surface gaps Search Console can’t, and Bingbot quietly powers DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and several AI-search products, so Bing indexation feeds your AI-visibility picture. Generating the API key is the only fiddly part of onboarding, so we wrote a full from-scratch walkthrough — create the Bing account, verify ownership, generate the key, and connect it.

Full detail: Bing Webmaster Tools connector — step by step →

Step 6 — Turn on CrUX field data

What you click. In Settings → Connectors, open the CrUX card and click Enable. There’s no key and no OAuth — CrUX data is public.

What you’ll see. On the next sync, performance findings gain real-user field measurements at the 75th percentile — LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB, mobile and desktop separately — shown alongside Lighthouse lab data. The site-wide view lives under Project → Performance.

Why it matters. CrUX is the exact dataset Google uses for the Core Web Vitals ranking signal, so it’s the most authoritative performance measure you can get. When field and lab scores disagree, that mismatch is itself a finding. Note CrUX only covers pages (or origins) with enough Chrome traffic to be statistically significant — low-traffic pages fall back to origin-level or show “No CrUX data,” which is exactly the gap Step 7’s tag closes.

Full detail: CrUX field-data connector →

Step 7 — Install the VisibilityIQ tag

What you click. In your project, open Get Your Tag, copy the one-line snippet, and paste it into your site — into the <head> of every page, the same way you’d add any analytics tag (a site-wide template, a tag manager, or your theme’s head include).

What you’ll see. Once the tag is live, return to the project and you’ll see four verify checks confirm the install — that the snippet is present, loading, reporting, and attributing pages correctly. As your visitors load the tagged pages, those checks go green one by one, and a “Your real-user field data” panel begins filling in with first-party LCP, INP, CLS, and TTFB measured directly from your own traffic.

Field data appears once your visitors arrive

The verify checks and the field-data panel populate once your visitors load the tagged pages — there’s no synthetic backfill. A low-traffic page or a site you just tagged will show the checks green but the data panel sparse until real sessions accumulate. This is real-user measurement; it reflects whoever actually visits.

Why it matters. CrUX (Step 6) only reports pages with enough Chrome traffic to clear Google’s significance threshold, and it lags on a 28-day window. The first-party tag fills that gap: it measures every tagged page, including the long tail CrUX can’t see, and it does so from your own visitors in near-real time. Together, CrUX and the tag give you both the authoritative Google-ranking view and complete per-page coverage.

Step 8 — Review your top issues

What you click. Go to Audit → Issues. Findings are sorted by severity, Critical first. Start at the top.

What you’ll see. Many findings are scoped template-wide rather than listed page-by-page: when the same defect appears across pages that share a template, VisibilityIQ surfaces one finding with the template pattern plus the full set of affected pages, so you see the blast radius before you touch anything.

Why it matters. Template-wide scope is leverage. Fixing the template once lifts every page that matches it — fix one header include and you can clear the issue on hundreds of pages in a single change, instead of grinding through them individually. With GSC and GA4 connected (Steps 3–4), these are already ranked by real traffic and revenue, not just raw technical severity.

Full detail: Template vs page-level issues → · Reading your audit results →

Step 9 — Apply a guided fix

What you click. Click any finding to open its detail panel.

What you’ll see. Every finding opens with plain-language guidance: what’s wrong, why it matters in business terms, the evidence that triggered it (the exact tag, header, or raw-vs-rendered diff), and ordered, concrete steps to resolve it. Where the fix is a file — a robots.txt rule, an llms.txt file, a JSON-LD block, an hreflang map, a canonical tag — VisibilityIQ generates the corrected file for you, ready to download or open as a pull request. You don’t hand-write it from a description.

Why it matters. This is the core difference from a checklist tool: a finding is the start of a guided fix, not a CSV row to decipher. We hand you the corrected file, not a list of complaints. Risky changes (removing a noindex, rewriting canonicals at scale) are labeled so you know what to review before you apply — nothing is ever silently changed on your site.

Full detail: Fixing common issues →

Step 10 — Re-crawl to verify

What you click. After you’ve shipped a fix, return to the project and click Run audit.

What you’ll see. The new run re-checks the affected pages and the issue count drops as resolved findings move to Fixed status; anything that comes back is marked Regressed. Over successive runs the score trend rises, and comparing two runs shows exactly what changed between them. Re-crawls after the first are incremental by default — only changed pages are re-fetched unless you trigger a full crawl.

Why it matters. A fix isn’t done until it’s verified against the live site. Re-crawling closes the loop and proves the change landed — and catches the case where a “fix” introduced a regression somewhere else. This read → fix → verify cycle (Steps 8–10) is the loop you’ll run for the life of the project.

Full detail: Comparing audit runs →

Step 11 — Check AI-bot access and llms.txt

What you click. Open Audit → AI crawler access.

What you’ll see. An AI-bot-access table that tests each crawler separately — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, Bytespider — and shows, per bot, whether it’s allowed or blocked and why. It flags pages open to traditional search but blocked to AI crawlers, checks for your llms.txt file at the site root, and validates its contents. Where llms.txt is missing or incomplete, VisibilityIQ generates a ready-to-deploy file.

Why it matters. AI crawlers follow different access rules than Googlebot, and as AI answers become a real discovery channel, being readable to them matters. Blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot in robots.txt — often by accident, via an over-broad disallow — quietly removes you from AI surfaces while leaving Google access untouched. The table makes that visible per bot instead of conflating them.

Full detail: AI crawler access checks → · llms.txt not detected →

Step 12 — Set your sync cadence and schedule

What you click. Open Settings → Crawl schedule and pick a cadence for recurring audits; in Settings → Connectors, confirm each connector’s sync cadence.

What you’ll see. Audits then run automatically on your chosen schedule, and the connectors keep their data fresh in the background — Google connectors sync daily, Bing weekly, CrUX on its rolling 28-day window. New findings show up on their own, and your score trend builds a history without you triggering each run by hand.

Why it matters. Onboarding is a one-time push; visibility is a standing concern. Scheduling turns the manual read-fix-verify loop into an ongoing watch — regressions, newly broken links, a connector that drifts, an AI bot that gets blocked by a config change all surface on their own, while you’re notified rather than finding out months later in a traffic dip.

Where to go next

You’ve finished onboarding. From here:

• Go deeper on the audit: How the crawler works and the render-parity diff.
• Add competitors: Adding competitors for keyword-gap analysis against up to 20 rivals.
• Track rankings: Rank tracking setup for daily keyword positions across Google and Bing.
• All your data sources: Connectors overview — how each one weights and reconciles findings.

If you get stuck, email support@visibilityiq365.com — we aim to respond within one business day.