Troubleshooting

What to try when something breaks. Issues are organized from most-common to least-common.

If you've worked through the relevant section and you're still stuck, email support@bdgeotracker.com with your license key (first and last 4 characters only, please) and a description of what you tried.

Can't sign in

Symptom: Your email + password is rejected at sign-in.

Most common causes:

Wrong password

Tap Forgot password? Contact support at the bottom of the login screen and email us — a self-service reset email is on the roadmap; until it ships, support rotates passwords within 1 business day.

Account not yet created

If you bought BD GEO Tracker but haven't gone through /signup yet, your account row doesn't have an email + password attached. Hit "Have a license key but no password yet? Sign in with license →" on the login screen, sign in with your BDSH- key, then set a password from Account → Security.

Subscription canceled or paused

If your subscription is in a non-active state, your license is technically issued but won't authenticate. The login flow shows "License not active" rather than a password error. Check your subscription status at getbdshield.com/my-account/subscriptions. If a payment failed, update your card. If you canceled and want to come back, re-subscribe — your historical data is preserved.

Invalid license at signup

Symptom: You paste your license key into the signup form and get "License not recognized" or "Invalid license key."

Most common causes, in order:

Trailing or leading whitespace

When you copy the key from the email, your clipboard sometimes captures an invisible space at the start or end. The login field rejects this.

Fix: Re-copy from the email, or open getbdshield.com/my-account/licenses and copy directly from the license display field there. The display field trims whitespace for you.

Wrong key format

License keys follow BDSH-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX exactly. Four blocks of four characters, three hyphens, sixteen total alphanumeric characters plus the BDSH prefix. If your key looks different, you may have an old or test key.

Fix: Check the license email for the correct key. If you can't find the email, log into getbdshield.com and check your licenses page.

Subscription not active

If your subscription is canceled, paused, or has a failed payment, the license is technically issued but signup will reject it.

Fix: Check your subscription status at getbdshield.com/my-account/subscriptions. Update your card or re-subscribe, then try signup again.

Run stalled

Symptom: You clicked Run now, the dashboard shows progress on 1-3 engines, but one engine has been "in flight" for more than 30 seconds.

What's happening: Each engine call has a 30-second hard timeout. If an engine hasn't responded in that window, the system marks it failed and moves on — there's no infinite wait. A stalled-looking run usually means the queue is busy or the engine returned a partial response we're still parsing.

What to do:

Refresh the page after 60 seconds. Most runs complete inside one minute. If the dashboard still shows in-flight after 2 minutes, the run is genuinely stuck.
If the run is still stalled at 5 minutes, click Cancel run on the prompt detail page. The snapshot will finalize with the engines that completed. The failed engine will be marked and won't count against your trend calculations.
If multiple runs are stalling across prompts, there's likely a provider outage. Check status.bdgeotracker.com for any open incidents.

If a single engine consistently stalls on the same prompt across multiple runs, the prompt may be triggering an engine-specific issue (often related to length, phrasing, or content policy). Try simplifying the prompt and see if the stalls clear.

Engine failures

Symptom: A snapshot finalizes but one engine is marked Failed instead of returning a result.

Common reasons:

Content-policy refusal

The engine refused the prompt because it pattern-matched as restricted content. Common triggers: medical advice, legal advice, political topics, anything that names individual people in a comparative way.

Fix: Rephrase the prompt. If the refused content is core to your tracking need, accept that some engines will refuse it and others will answer — the partial data is still useful.

Rate limit

The engine is rate-limiting our API key. The system honors the engine's own Retry-After header and resumes when the engine says we can.

Fix: Nothing on your end. If you see rate-limit failures clustered around the same time of day, mention it in support — we'll adjust scheduling.

Provider outage

The engine's API is down. Visible on the provider's own status page and usually on ours.

Fix: Wait. The scheduler will pick up where it left off once the provider's status flips green.

Token-limit overrun

The prompt was long enough that the engine truncated its response, and the parser couldn't extract a clean answer.

Fix: Shorten the prompt. Most prompts work better at under 200 characters anyway.

Prompt rejected on save

Symptom: You click Save prompt and get an error message instead of seeing the prompt appear.

Possible causes:

Prompt slot limit reached

Your tier's prompt slots are full. The error message will say "Prompt limit reached for your tier."

Fix: Delete a prompt you no longer need, or upgrade your tier.

Duplicate prompt

You already have an identical prompt under the same brand. The system flags exact duplicates to prevent accidental double-tracking.

Fix: Edit the prompt text to make it distinct, or find and delete the existing duplicate.

Disallowed content

If the prompt text contains content that all four engines would refuse (e.g., explicit content, instructions for harm), the system blocks it at save time rather than waste a run.

Fix: Rewrite the prompt. If you believe the rejection is wrong, email support with the prompt text and we'll review.

Can't log in

Symptom: Login page loads but submitting the key does nothing, or you get a generic error.

Try in this order:

Clear cookies for app.bdgeotracker.com. A stale session cookie sometimes confuses the auth flow.
Try a different browser. Chrome or Firefox in default config work. If you're using a browser with aggressive privacy extensions (uBlock with strict settings, Brave with maximum shields), the auth request may be getting blocked.
Disable VPN or check your country. We don't geo-block, but we do see occasional false-positive abuse detection on certain VPN exit IPs. Connecting from your normal IP usually resolves it.
Check your network. If you're on a corporate network with strict outbound filtering, app.bdgeotracker.com may be classified incorrectly by a category-based firewall. Whitelisting the domain fixes it.

If none of these resolves the issue, email support with: your license key (first and last 4 characters), the browser you're using, and any error message text you see.

Weekly digest not arriving

Symptom: You're a Monday morning person, you turned on the digest, and it's not landing.

Check:

Notifications setting. Go to Account → Notifications and confirm "Weekly digest" is on. The default is on, but it gets toggled off accidentally.
Email address on file. The digest goes to the email associated with your getbdshield.com account, not a separate one you might have set in the app. Check the email is correct at getbdshield.com/my-account/edit-account.
Spam folder. The digest sends from reports@bdgeotracker.com. Whitelist that address.
Account age. Brand-new accounts get their first digest on the second Monday after signup, not the first. This gives the system a week of data to summarize.

If all four are confirmed and the digest still isn't arriving, email support.

PDF generation failed

Symptom: You clicked Generate PDF and got an error or no download.

Common causes:

Too much data

If you request a 24-month date range on an Agency account with 50 prompts, the resulting PDF is large and slow to render. The system caps at 60 seconds of generation time.

Fix: Generate a shorter date range or exclude some prompts. Or schedule the export as a recurring weekly/monthly job, which uses a different, slower-but-more-generous generation queue.

No data in range

If you select a date range where you have no snapshots (e.g., before you saved your first prompt), the system errors instead of generating an empty document.

Fix: Pick a range that overlaps with your actual data.

Browser blocked the download

Some browsers block automatic downloads from background tabs. The PDF is generated successfully, but your browser silently rejects the download.

Fix: Check your downloads panel. Also check the email — every generated PDF is also sent to your account email as a backup.

Data looks wrong

Symptom: You think a mention rate or rank number is incorrect — for example, you saw your brand in the actual engine response yourself, but the snapshot says it wasn't mentioned.

What to check:

Open the raw engine response. Click on the snapshot, then on the engine that says "not mentioned." The raw text is shown. Look for whether your brand name appears in a context the parser would consider a mention (full sentence about your brand, not just in a disclaimer or in the prompt repetition).
Check your aliases. If the engine used a variation of your brand name (acronym, alternative spelling, product name instead of company name), it may not match our default detector. Add aliases under Brand settings → Aliases.
Check the date. Make sure you're looking at a snapshot, not at a live test you ran manually in the engine's own UI. Engines change their answers over hours and days.

If after all three checks you still believe the parser missed a clear mention, email support with the snapshot ID. We use these as test cases to improve the parser.

When to email support

For everything else: support@bdgeotracker.com. Include:

Your license key (first 4 and last 4 characters)
The brand name involved
The prompt or snapshot ID if relevant
What you tried that didn't work
A screenshot if applicable

Response times: Starter and Growth within 1 business day, Agency within 4 business hours.