AI NativeWhen you add a brand, you choose one of two modes: demo or live. The choice affects what data fills your workspace, how long setup takes, and what the resulting profiles are good for.
What demo mode does
Demo mode builds a brand profile without touching the network. It runs a deterministic routine that derives a brand name from your domain, creates a fixed set of four need-state personas (Value seeker, Quality-first buyer, First-time buyer, Comparison shopper), and populates a prompt tree with pre-built question pairs per persona-stage cell. The whole process completes in under a second.
The profile looks like a real one. The prompt tree is structured correctly across the five funnel stages. The personas have business weights and goal descriptions. You can navigate every product view and run a demo scan against these prompts to see how the interface works.
The trade-off is accuracy. A demo profile does not read your site, does not know your actual competitors, and does not sample real AI assistant responses. Any numbers it produces are synthetic, labeled clearly as demo in the UI, and kept in a separate data series that never mixes with live scan results.
What live discovery does
Live mode triggers a multi-step job on the worker:
- The domain is crawled and page content is read.
- An LLM reads that content and synthesises the brand name, product lines, positioning, and a competitor set.
- Need-state personas are generated from the synthesised product context.
- The prompt tree is built by an LLM grounded in real search demand and real AI assistant question patterns.
- The system proposes brand name variations for you to review at the identity finalisation step.
This takes several minutes. During that time the setup page shows the job as running or queued. The brand appears on the setup page when the worker finishes. If the crawl returns nothing or the LLM is unreachable, the job errors with a plain message rather than silently falling back to demo-grade output.
You are redirected to a status page after submitting a live onboarding. A meta-refresh polls the page. When the job finishes, the brand link appears.
The review gate
Both modes pass through the same review screen before baseline scans launch. You see the brand name, all products found, their need-state personas with business weights, and the identity block where you can finalise name variations and domains. You launch the baseline scans from this screen. Nothing scans automatically.
In demo mode you land on this screen immediately. In live mode you see the status page first, then reach the review screen once the job is done.
When live measurements start
The first scan you launch from the review screen runs in the mode you used for onboarding. After that, every product overview page lets you run either a demo scan (synthetic, free, kept out of your live trend) or a live scan (queries real AI engines, uses credits). The two are tracked as separate data series. A product switches to showing its live series the moment the first live scan completes. The demo series stays in storage but is no longer displayed.
If you onboarded in demo mode and later want a live profile, use the guided wizard again with the same domain and choose live. The worker will build a fresh profile and the new live scans will replace your demo trend line.
Related docs
Questions
What is the real difference between a demo scan and a live scan?
A demo scan runs a synthetic pass over your prompt tree and produces deterministic results. A live scan sends each question to the actual AI assistants your buyers use and scores the real responses. Only live scan data builds your measurement trend.
Does live discovery cost credits?
Onboarding in live mode does not deduct credits directly. The baseline scans you launch from the review screen, and any subsequent live scans, use credits. Demo scans are always free.
Can I undo a demo onboarding and redo it as live?
Yes. Run the guided wizard again with the same domain and choose live mode. A new brand and product profile will be created. Your demo data stays in the database but the product displays its live series once the first live scan completes.
What happens if my site is not crawlable?
The live ingestion job will error with a message explaining that no content could be fetched. The error is visible on the onboarding status page. Your demo profile is not affected. You can correct any crawl-blocking issues on your site and retry, or onboard manually by creating a brand and adding products by hand.
Why does live onboarding take minutes?
The job fans out multiple steps: site crawl, LLM reading and synthesis, persona generation, and a demand-grounded prompt tree build. Each LLM call is done on the worker, not in the web request, to avoid timeouts. Single-flight protection means re-submitting the form does not start a second job; you are shown a message if a job is already running for your workspace.
Are the demo personas the same for every brand?
Yes. The four demo personas (Value seeker, Quality-first buyer, First-time buyer, Comparison shopper) are fixed. Live personas are generated by an LLM reading your actual product positioning, so they reflect your category, market, and competitor context.
What does "series" mean on the scan history?
Your scan history is split into series by mode. All done runs in the same mode are one series. Trend charts and the comparison view always draw from one series at a time, so demo data cannot inflate or dilute a live trend line. The product shows whichever series has live data once a live scan exists.