Getting started

You'll have your first snapshot in under five minutes. This guide covers the three things that have to happen before you see data: buying a license, logging in, and creating your first brand.

Step 1: Buy a license

BD GEO Tracker is sold through the BDShield store at getbdshield.com/product/bd-geo-tracker. Pick the tier that matches your scale:

Starter ($19/mo) — 1 brand, 3 prompts, weekly refresh. Right for solo founders or anyone validating whether this category of tool earns its keep.
Growth ($59/mo) — 3 brands, 15 prompts, daily refresh. The default for in-house marketing teams.
Agency ($179/mo) — 5 brands, 50 prompts, daily refresh, white-label PDFs, priority support. Built for agencies tracking client brands.

Annual billing costs 10× the monthly rate. You save two months. You can switch tiers later — see Account management for upgrade and downgrade rules.

Every tier includes a 14-day money-back guarantee. If the tool doesn't earn its keep in two weeks, email support@bdgeotracker.com and we refund in full.

After checkout, you'll get two emails:

WooCommerce receipt — proof of purchase.
License delivery — contains your license key. Format: BDSH-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.

If the license email doesn't arrive within 10 minutes, check spam, then log in to getbdshield.com/my-account/licenses. Your key is visible there.

Step 2: Create your account

Go to app.bdgeotracker.com/signup.

Enter your full name (optional), a work email, a password (8+ characters), and your license key. The license key validates against our license server; if it's good, your account is created and you're signed in.

The email + password you set here becomes your sign-in credential from then on. The license key stays attached to the account and gates your tier — you won't need to type it again unless you upgrade or change it.

Step 3: Log in next time

Go to app.bdgeotracker.com/login. Enter your email and password. You're in.

A session cookie holds for 7 days. After that, sign in again.

If you bought BD GEO Tracker before password sign-in shipped and you have a license key but no password yet, the login screen has a "Sign in with license" option. Use it once, then set a password from Account → Security so future logins go through the standard email + password flow.

If your email or password is rejected, see Troubleshooting.

Step 3: Create your first brand

Once you're in, the dashboard shows an empty state with a single button: New brand.

A brand has two required fields and one optional one.

Brand name (required)

The exact name you want the system to look for in AI responses. For most companies this is your product name as it appears on your homepage — "Stripe", "Notion", "Linear". Capitalization matters less than spelling; we normalize case.

If your brand has a common-word collision (e.g., "Apple" is also a fruit), the dashboard will flag this on the brand page so you understand why some matches look noisy. You can refine the match in Brand settings → Match rules.

Domain (required)

Your primary domain — stripe.com, notion.so. We use this to:

Match cited URLs that point to your site (counted as "self-cited")
Disambiguate your brand from name collisions
Build the share-of-voice baseline

Use the apex domain. Don't include www. or https://. If you have multiple domains (acquisitions, regional sites), add the primary one here and list the others under Brand settings → Alternate domains.

Competitors (optional but recommended)

Add 1-5 named competitors as Name + Domain pairs. Examples for a CRM:

Salesforce, salesforce.com
HubSpot, hubspot.com
Pipedrive, pipedrive.com

Competitors unlock share-of-voice. Without them, the dashboard tells you whether you were mentioned. With them, it tells you whether you were mentioned more or less than the alternatives the engine is also considering. That second number is the one that drives decisions.

You can add or remove competitors later. Historical data backfills automatically when you add one — we re-parse stored snapshots against the new competitor list.

What happens after you save the brand

The brand lands on your dashboard with zero prompts and zero data. Two empty states, in sequence:

No prompts yet. Click Add prompt to write your first one. The dashboard nudges you toward 3-5 to start. Read Writing good prompts before you write more than one — a bad prompt set produces noise that's hard to clean up later.
No snapshots yet. Once you save a prompt, you have two options: wait for the next scheduled run (Monday UTC on Starter, the next daily run on Growth and Agency), or click Run now to trigger an immediate run.

A manual run hits all four engines in parallel. The dashboard shows engine progress live: ChatGPT done, Claude in flight, Gemini done, Perplexity in flight. Total time runs 15-60 seconds depending on engine response time.

When all four engines finish, the snapshot finalizes. You'll see:

Mention rate for that prompt
Average rank when mentioned
Top cited URLs
Competitor share-of-voice

If an engine fails (rate limit, timeout, content-policy refusal), the snapshot still finalizes with the engines that succeeded. We mark the failed engine on the snapshot so you know the sample is partial.

Two things to do in the first week

Tune your prompts

Your first prompts will be wrong. That's normal. After 3-5 days of data:

Drop prompts that no engine answers (too vague, or too niche)
Drop prompts that always mention you (you don't need to track them — they're solved)
Drop prompts that never mention you and never mention a competitor either (the question doesn't exist in the engines' worldview)
Keep prompts where rank or share-of-voice is moving

This filtering matters because your prompt slots are finite. On Starter you have 3 slots total. Spending one on a question no engine answers is a waste.

Turn on the weekly digest

In Account → Notifications, the weekly digest is on by default. Leave it on for the first month. It'll land Mondays UTC with week-over-week deltas and the biggest movers. If you find yourself ignoring it, turn it off — but most users say it's the moment they actually look at the data.