Quickstart

This is the fastest path from a brand-new account to your first AI visibility report. If you're integrating programmatically, see the Overview for MCP and REST instead.

1. Start a scan

Enter your website on the Pendium homepage and start a scan, or sign up first and add your site. Sign-in is handled by email or a connected account — no API key needed to use the product.

2. Confirm your brand

Pendium reads your site and drafts your setup, then asks you to confirm it:

• Your business and competitors — who you are, your category, and who you're up against.
• Buyer personas — the buyer types whose perspective the scan runs from (you can edit roles, goals, and pain points).
• Topics and queries — the questions that get asked of AI platforms, tagged by reach level.
• Platforms — the AI platforms your plan scans. Free scans Gemini and Google AI Overviews; Starter adds ChatGPT and Claude; Pro also adds Perplexity.

While you review, Pendium builds your knowledge base from your site in the background.

3. Read your first report

The first visibility scan runs in about a minute or two. You'll see live progress, then land on your dashboard with:

• Your AI Visibility score (0–100) and what level it maps to.
• Per-platform and per-persona breakdowns — where you're strong, where you're invisible.
• Top competitors AI named alongside or instead of you.
• Cited sources shaping AI's view of your category.
• Recommendations — prioritized actions to improve.

4. Do the next thing

Your dashboard suggests the highest-impact next action based on where your brand stands. Common next steps:

• Review recommendations and work the highest-priority gaps.
• Set up your site — a public surface built for AI agents to read and cite.
• Create content on Create: pick a question your scan lost, approve the outline, and get an on-brand draft.
• Re-scan after you publish to watch the score move over time.

Free vs. paid

Your first scan is free to start on the web. Continuous scanning and some other managed features still require a paid plan — see pricing for the details.

On Starter or Pro (a free trial counts), finishing onboarding sets your brand up, and so does upgrading later. Autopilot turns on at two posts and one scan a week. Then Pendium reads your website (up to half an hour for a large site) before it writes anything, so your first content comes from what's on your site:

• Its Profile and FAQ pages are published, with the description and Business Info answers written from what Pendium read. Anything you've edited yourself stays as you wrote it.
• Pendium writes its first post and publishes it once it passes the quality check.
• Its site build is requested once the first post is written, so the site is built from your first content. The site stays private until you make it public.

The Setup Guide shows each of these as it happens: reading your site, updating your business facts, refreshing your company profile, writing your Profile and FAQ pages, writing your first post, and requesting your site build. Each one reads as waiting, working, done, skipped (with nothing to do, such as no website on file), or didn't finish (with the reason). While Pendium is still writing your brand voice, or is about to request your site, the guide says so and doesn't ask you to do it yourself.

We email you when that first content is ready, and again when your site is ready to review. Setting up a brand on the free plan maps your site but doesn't read it, and writes no Business Info, so onboarding stays quick.

On the free plan, Pendium creates none of these.

Next steps

• AI Visibility Score — what the score means and how scans work.
• Create: write posts from what your scan found.
• Site: Pages & Feed — your public, AI-readable site.
• Connect your agent over MCP — drive all of the above from Claude, ChatGPT, or a coding agent.