> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getcited.in/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Create your first brand

> Set up your first brand in Cited — what to prepare, what happens at each step, and when to expect your first AI visibility data.

Creating your first brand in Cited takes about 10 minutes of setup time and generates your first AI visibility data within 24 hours of provisioning. This page walks through what to prepare and what to expect at each step.

## Before you start

Have the following ready:

* **Your brand name and primary website URL.** Use the brand name as it appears in the market, not the legal entity name.
* **A short description of what your brand does.** One or two sentences that describe your product or service category.
* **Your primary market.** India, UAE, US, UK, Europe, SEA, or Global. This matters because AI platforms behave differently by region — the same prompt can surface different brands depending on where the question is asked.
* **3–5 competitor brand names and their websites.** Optional but strongly recommended. Competitors enable [share of voice](/concepts/metrics/share-of-voice) and [gap analysis](/get-started/configure-competitors), which are the most actionable parts of your dashboard.
* **Your category or product type.** A few words describing your space (e.g., "D2C skincare," "B2B CRM," "premium luggage").

## Step 1 — Sign up

Go to [getcited.in/early-access](https://www.getcited.in/early-access) and submit the signup form. You will receive a response within 24 hours with next steps.

## Step 2 — Brand setup

The Cited team provisions your brand. During setup, Cited runs brand intelligence — an automated process that reads your website and competitor sites to understand your positioning, key use cases, and the language your category uses.

Based on this research, Cited generates a custom [prompt library](/methodology/query-generation) of questions that represent how real customers ask about your category across AI platforms. On the Starter plan this is 25 prompts, Pro gives you 75, and Scale goes up to 125+. Each prompt is tagged with both an intent type (where the customer is in their decision journey) and a topic (what subject they're asking about), so you can read every metric in your dashboard along either axis.

## Step 3 — First pipeline run

Your prompt library is run across the AI platforms covered by your plan tier:

* **Starter** — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini
* **Pro** — Starter platforms plus Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode
* **Scale** and **Custom** — Pro platforms plus Claude and Grok

Each response is parsed for brand mentions, citations, [sentiment](/concepts/metrics/sentiment), and position using Cited's [mention extraction](/methodology/mention-extraction) layer.

Results are aggregated into daily metrics so you can track changes over time.

## Step 4 — Your first report

Within 24 hours of the first pipeline run, your Cited dashboard will have initial visibility data. You will see your [mention rate](/concepts/metrics/mention-rate) across platforms, which competitors are showing up where you are not, and which prompts are your biggest gaps.

See [Understanding your first report](/get-started/understanding-your-first-report) for a walkthrough of what each section means.

## Timing expectations

From signup to actionable data takes approximately two weeks, with initial snapshots available within 48 hours.

| Milestone                        | Typical timeline               |
| -------------------------------- | ------------------------------ |
| Signup to provisioning           | \~24 hours                     |
| Provisioning to first data       | \~24 hours after pipeline runs |
| First meaningful trends          | \~1 week of daily data         |
| First actionable recommendations | \~2 weeks                      |

The first 24–48 hours give you a snapshot. After a week of daily runs, you start seeing trends. After two weeks, the data is stable enough to act on with confidence — see [Reading your data with confidence](/methodology/data-freshness) for how to interpret movement at each window.

## Next step

[Understanding your first report](/get-started/understanding-your-first-report) explains how to read your dashboard and where to focus first. You can also jump to [mention rate](/concepts/metrics/mention-rate) to understand the most important metric you'll see.