Quick start — your first brief tomorrow morning.
Paste your website. ScoutRival reads it, maps your rivals, learns your voice, and has a competitive brief waiting at the hour you pick. About fifteen minutes of setup, then it runs itself.
Setup takes about fifteen minutes, most of which is ScoutRival reading your website while you drink something. When you're done, a competitive brief lands in Telegram, Slack or Discord every morning at the hour you picked — verdict, what your rivals did, and posts drafted in your voice.
Step 1 · Create your account
Head to scoutrival.com/signup. You can continue with Google, continue with LinkedIn, or use an email and password. The Free plan doesn't ask for a card, so you can run the whole setup before deciding whether to pay.
If you bought a plan from the pricing page first, you'll land on the signup screen with a green “subscription confirmed” banner and your email already filled in. Creating the account claims the subscription — you'll land straight on your paid plan. Use the same browser you paid in.
Step 2 · Paste your website
Onboarding asks for one thing: your website URL. We fill in the brand name from your domain automatically — you can overwrite it.
Then ScoutRival reads your site. Five passes, roughly 30–45 seconds:
- Your homepage — what you do, who you serve, your industry, your social links
- Your colours and logo — pulled from your actual site, not guessed from a template
- Your voice — we read up to six of your real pages and build a writing fingerprint
- Your competitors — four to six real, current rivals, not a stale database dump
- Your radar — the first competitor scan is queued so tomorrow isn't empty
A slow site can push this past a minute. There's a Skip and edit manually link at every point — anything already extracted is saved, so skipping never loses work.
Step 3 · Confirm what we read
You'll see a summary card: your industry, your colours, a three-word read on your voice, and the competitors we found. Each row carries a confidence chip — High confidence or Best guess.
Fix the wrong ones now. Everything on this card feeds every post, article and recommendation you'll ever get. A wrong industry is much cheaper to correct here than in eighty pieces of content.
If your palette came back orange, extraction couldn't find yours and fell back to ScoutRival's own. Set them by hand on the Visual Identity tab — it takes ten seconds and it's a one-time job.
Step 4 · Add your products and services
This is the single highest-leverage field in the product, and it's the one people skip.
Every content idea ScoutRival generates has to map back to something you actually sell. That's a deliberate constraint: it's what stops the AI writing generic thought-leadership that sells nothing. But it cuts both ways — if your services list is empty, the output goes generic, and the engine that keeps your ideas fresh refuses to run at all.
Go to Brand → Profile → Products & Services and list what you sell. One line each. Ten minutes here changes the quality of everything downstream.
Read more: Products & Services →
Step 5 · Connect a delivery channel
This step is not optional, and it's the one that quietly breaks setups.
If no channel is connected, no brief is generated. ScoutRival doesn't write a brief into a void — the nightly job skips any brand with nowhere to send it. You'd have to generate one by hand every day. Connect a channel and this never comes up again.
Go to Channels and pick one:
- Telegram — one tap. No IDs to copy, no webhook to create. Start here.
- Slack — one click. Approve ScoutRival and pick a channel; no webhook to create
- Discord — create a channel Webhook and paste the URL
Then hit Test. Slack and Discord webhooks are accepted the moment you paste them — we don't call your webhook to check it — so a typo will look connected and silently fail every morning. The test send is what proves it.
Step 6 · Your first brief
When you add the channel, you pick the hour and the timezone. That's your send time. Tomorrow morning, at that hour, you get:
- Where you stand — your keyword position, your visibility in AI answers, how busy your rivals were
- What your rivals did — every tracked competitor, what they published, and what it means
- Your verdict and next move — one read of the situation, one thing to do about it
- Content, drafted — posts for the platforms you enabled, plus a blog angle
Don't want to wait? Open Daily Brief and hit Generate today's brief. It runs the real thing in about half a minute.
The send time belongs to the brand, not the channel. If you add a second channel at a different hour, you move the whole brand's brief to that hour. More on send times →
What's next
- Make it unlimited — connect your own AI key and generate on your provider's bill instead of your credit balance. Start with OpenRouter.
- Get found by AI — check whether ChatGPT and Perplexity can even read your site. Getting cited by AI →
- Ship your first article — connect WordPress and publish straight from the editor.
- Understand the meter — how credits work →