Onboarding

New accounts start in Welcome, a short guided setup. It creates your first project and starts its first AI visibility check without you having to click Run. Your part takes about two minutes. The check then finishes on its own, usually in 5 to 10 minutes, and you get an email with the results. In OpenLens a project is one brand with one website. One brand, one website. That’s the model.

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1. About you

Welcome starts with a few quick questions:

• what to call you;
• your agency or organization, if you have one;
• what you want from OpenLens.

For the last one, pick every goal that applies and drag them into order. The one at the top is your main goal. The options are:

• see how AI describes my brand;
• compare my visibility with competitors;
• find which sources AI trusts and cites;
• know what content to create or update;
• measure the impact of our SEO and content work;
• check if my site is ready for AI search and AI agents;
• report AI visibility to clients or leadership.

If you’re not sure yet, choose Just exploring for now. You can also tell us how you heard about OpenLens. If a teammate already invited you to a workspace, Welcome shows those invitations first. Join one to work alongside your team, or create a separate workspace of your own.

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2. Your brand

Enter the brand name and its website, then click Research my brand. If you tried the OpenLens preview on the homepage before signing up, Welcome already knows the brand. Confirm Track ? and research starts right away.

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3. Research

OpenLens reads the website and public sources to learn what the brand does and which companies AI compares it with. This usually takes about a minute, and the checklist shows each stage as it completes.

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4. Competitors

Review the competitors the research found. You can keep up to five:

• remove any that don’t belong;
• add ones it missed;
• use Edit to fix a name or website.

If a competitor has a common name (‘Acme’, ‘Atlas’), make sure its website is right, so OpenLens tracks that company and not another one with the same name.

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5. Topics

Name what you want to track: the subjects your customers ask AI about. Type your own, or pick from the suggestions the research found. Each topic becomes five prompts, the questions OpenLens asks every AI platform on your plan. Click Build my dashboard when you’re done. You can add more topics, and edit or add prompts, later in Manage Prompts. If you don’t name any topics, the project starts with a Brand Identity topic: five questions about what your brand is, its strengths and weaknesses, how it compares with your first competitor, its alternatives, and what customers say about it.

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6. Free trial (optional)

While your dashboard is being built, a workspace on the Free plan can start a 7-day free trial of Starter or Agency. Each plan card shows its AI platforms and what it adds over Free. Start free trial opens Stripe Checkout:

• nothing is due today;
• the plan continues when the trial ends unless you cancel first;
• if you leave Checkout, with its back link or your browser’s Back button, you return to the offer.

Skip for now, I’ll try it out first takes you straight to your dashboard. You can start a trial later from Billing. The offer appears only to someone who manages billing, in a workspace that has never had a subscription. See Plans for everything each plan includes.

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7. Your first check

As soon as the prompts are ready, OpenLens starts the project’s first check:

• It runs every prompt on each AI platform your plan includes. Answers stream onto the dashboard as they arrive, and you can leave the page while it runs.
• It uses credits like any run you start yourself.
• Weekly re-checks switch on with it, so your numbers keep updating. Turn them off from the banner on the first-check page, or change the cadence in Settings.

If the first check can’t start, for example because there aren’t enough credits, the page says why and lets you start it yourself.

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8. Your first results

When the check completes, the dashboard shows:

• visibility;
• share of voice;
• average position;
• a per-platform scorecard;
• how you compare with your competitors.

You also get an email with your first results: how often AI mentioned you and on which platforms, how you compare with your competitors, and the sources AI cited most. The PDF report is attached. See Dashboard for what each number means.

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Adding another project

Welcome runs once, for your first project. To track another brand, open Your projects and click Add project:

1. Enter the brand’s website, and OpenLens analyzes it, usually in 30 to 60 seconds.
2. Confirm the brand and its competitors.
3. Open the project while its prompts are prepared in the background.

On Manage Prompts, a short guide helps you review topics and prompts, use your own prompts, and choose platforms, countries and credits. You then start that project’s first run yourself.

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Where the data comes from

When you set up a project, OpenLens researches the brand’s website and public sources to propose competitors and topic suggestions. Each topic you keep is then expanded into five prompts that read like questions a real person would ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google. Those prompts are what OpenLens sends to every supported AI platform on each run.

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How to use it

Reviewing prompts after the first check. Open Manage Prompts to see the prompts grouped by topic. They should sound like questions your customers would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity. Edit anything that doesn’t, delete prompts that miss the mark, and add your own with + Add prompt on any topic. Attach prompt attributes if you want to filter by them later. The next check, scheduled or started with Run Now, uses the updated set. When a competitor needs its website. OpenLens matches competitors by name. That works when the name is distinctive (‘Roost’, ‘Rain Design’). It fails when the name is common or shared with other companies (‘Acme’, ‘Atlas’). In those cases, make sure the competitor’s website is set: it locks the match to that specific company, so later runs don’t pick up the wrong brand. If you’re not sure whether a name is distinctive enough, add the website anyway. It costs nothing.