Run your first audit

The fastest way to see where you stand is the free audit. It requires no credit card and returns a measured snapshot of how AI engines currently treat your brand.

Run the free audit

1. Go to the free audit.
2. Enter your website URL.
3. Check what we detected. Stride summarizes the business, who it serves, what customers are trying to accomplish, what sets the offer apart, and how customers buy. It then proposes the topics you should be found for, buyer-intent customer searches, and your target market. Change a proposed topic and the generated searches update immediately; if you edit a search yourself, Stride preserves it until you choose Refresh from topics. Local-service questions name the service area. For online stores with a country or regional market, three questions stay broad and two check product availability there; business-software questions stay broad by default. Geographic wording you add yourself remains in the audit. Purchase, price, comparison, and specific-use questions come first. Correct anything that would change the buyer questions or the businesses you compete with. Known competitor URLs are optional: when you leave them blank, Stride identifies the brands appearing most often in answers to the selected searches. If Stride cannot read your site from its servers, the form says so and you can fill in these fields yourself.
4. Enter your email so we can send the full report.
5. Wait for the audit to finish — it queries live AI engines, so it takes a couple of minutes rather than seconds.

During busy periods your audit may be queued instead of starting instantly. You'll see your place in line and an estimated wait. Either way the full report lands in the inbox you gave us — you don't need to keep the tab open or re-submit.

What the free audit includes

The audit is a bounded sample designed to show where the obvious gaps are:

• Site crawl — Stride reads your public site to build a brand profile (what you sell, who you serve, how you describe yourself).
• Buyer-style prompts — A taxonomy-based basket of up to 20 prompt checks that prioritizes purchase, price, comparison, and specific-use questions while retaining informational coverage.
• Live engine queries — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Which engines your scheduled scans check after sign-up depends on your plan.
• Your result and grade — Where you ranked among the brands AI named, how many of the answers named you beside the competitor you entered (or, if you left it blank, the brand named most often), and how often AI put someone else first. Answers to questions that already contained your name are left out of these counts.
• An A–F grade — A band on one number: the share of answers that named you. A is 60% or more, B 40–59%, C 25–39%, D 10–24%, and F under 10%. It is not a comparison with other businesses, and the bands are printed in the report.
• Who AI names instead — The brands named more often than you, how many answers named each one, and how often you were recommended first.
• What a buyer sees — The question you missed on the most engines, with each engine's actual answer and the sources it linked, and a link to the fix for that question when there is one.
• Where AI gets its answers — The sites the engines cited for your questions, and whether your own site was among them.
• What an AI click is worth — A calculator that turns what a customer or order is worth to you, your conversion rate and an assumed number of AI visitors into a monthly figure. It is worded for how your business sells, and it is an estimate from the numbers you enter, not a forecast.
• What to fix first — Prioritized fixes grounded in the observed answers and site signals, each with what you can do yourself and what Stride does.
• Every question we asked — Each question, whether each engine named you, and who it recommended first. You can filter to the questions where you were missing.

The downloadable PDF has the same sections, with every engine's answer and every fix laid out in full. A PDF can't take input, so in place of the AI click calculator it explains how much better AI visitors convert and links back to the online report, where you can enter your own numbers.

Claim your audit (create a workspace)

Creating an account claims the audit and converts it into a tracked workspace:

1. Sign up with the same email you used for the audit.
2. Stride creates or reuses the site under your organization.
3. The detected profile, topics, and prompt candidates carry into onboarding.
4. If your account still needs a plan, complete checkout.
5. Confirm the compact business profile, then continue to the dashboard.

You keep access to the full audit report inside the app; the public link remains shareable.

From audit to first scan

The confirmation screen asks you to correct only the context that determines what Stride should measure:

• the business and customer;
• products or services;
• how customers buy;
• the target market; and
• the primary goal.

Stride drafts the profile from your homepage, your About page, and your product catalogue when one is public: a short description, a longer description of the brand, its positioning and who it serves, and a list of key features taken from the site. You can edit each of them, and they feed the prompts, personas and content Stride writes for you. If the draft misses what makes your business different, choose Something wrong? Re-analyze, say what was wrong, and Stride reads the site again. Fields you already edited are kept.

Below the profile, Stride suggests two starting audiences with different buying reasons, such as a repeat buyer and a buyer shopping for one occasion. Each shows an estimated age and income, the moments they buy for, and example questions they might ask an AI assistant. Keep, edit, or remove them.

Submitting that screen finalizes the starter prompts on the server. When the audit context is still accurate, Stride keeps its relevant candidates. When you correct the context, Stride recomposes generated candidates from the corrected profile. Prompts you wrote yourself and prompts already used for tracking are preserved.

Stride prepares at least 20 distinct buyer questions from your confirmed products, audience, and market. Up to 10 start as tracked prompts for the baseline; the rest appear under Visibility → Prompts → Suggested for you to review and add within your plan's prompt allowance. You can change the tracked set later; new questions are measured in a future full scan, not retroactively in the first result. If question generation is temporarily unavailable, confirmation asks you to retry rather than filling the list with generic templates.

The profile also proposes competitors from your site. Keep the ones that fit; they are saved in order until your plan's competitor slots are full.

You do not need to review crawled pages, edit a prompt grid, add competitors, or connect analytics before seeing the first result. The dashboard waits for your paid entitlement, reuses any scan already in progress, and starts the baseline once when needed. It shows processed-versus-total progress while the scan runs, including partial engine failures.

Optional connections and other setup work appear in Actions instead of blocking onboarding. Your first completed full scan becomes the baseline for every later trend.

After the scan

You'll land on the dashboard with a visibility state, Mention rate and Citation rate tiles, a secondary Visibility Index, the AI Engine Overview, and a prioritized Fix These Next list. For the first two weeks, until you start work on an action, a What Ran card sits where In Progress normally does. It lists what ran (site crawl, profile, baseline scan, AI Overviews, the brands and sources the answers named) and what is still running. The next steps only you can start, such as tracking the brand AI names most or running the AI readiness check, appear in Fix These Next tagged Next step. Read Understanding your Visibility Index next to interpret the index beside the underlying evidence.