01Before you start
Two things determine whether setup takes five minutes or fifty: where your site is hosted, and whether you can log into it.
You'll need
- Your website URL. The live domain you want optimized, not a staging copy.
- Admin access to your website. Required to install the plugin that applies fixes.
- An email address for the account and its notifications.
Helpful, but optional
- Google Search Console access for the domain. Connect it and Rank Authority can show you real click and impression data alongside its own scores.
- A Google Business Profile, if you serve customers in a specific area.
- A list of competitors. As many businesses as you can research that you genuinely compete with.
- A list of keywords. The terms you actually want to win.
- A list of AI prompts. The questions your customers would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity before buying.
Those last three are worth having if you already know them, but none of them are required. Rank Authority researches your site and your market and proposes competitors, keywords, and prompts for you — you can accept what it finds, edit it, or add your own at any time.
You can run the whole product without paying. The free plan covers sites up to 50 pages and includes everything the paid plans do — scanning, approving fixes, pushing them live, all of it. Nothing is held back behind the price.
Starting a paid plan gives you a full 7-day trial with every feature unlocked. The one limit during the trial is page count: it scans up to 100 pages. Either way you need the plugin installed before fixes can be applied to your site.
Platform support
Rank Authority scans and scores any public website, on any platform. Automatic fixes are applied through the Rank Authority plugin, which installs on six platforms:
| Platform | How the plugin installs |
|---|---|
| WordPress | Upload and activate the plugin file, then copy its connection key into Rank Authority. |
| Shopify | Install the Rank Authority app from your store's admin and authorize it. |
| Wix | Add Rank Authority from the app market and connect it to your site. |
| Webflow | Authorize Rank Authority against your Webflow project. |
| GoDaddy | Connect your GoDaddy website through the site connection screen. |
| Your marketing platform | If you installed Rank Authority from an app marketplace, the connection is already in place — nothing to install. |
On a platform not listed above, you'll still get every finding and the recommended fix in full — you or your developer apply them by hand.
02Install the app
Installing from the marketplace creates your Rank Authority account and links it to your existing login — there's no separate password to manage.
-
Open the app listing and choose Install
Pick the account or sub-account you want Rank Authority to run in. If you manage sites for multiple clients, install once per client account so their data stays separate.
-
Approve the permissions
You'll see exactly what Rank Authority can read and write before you approve. Nothing is accessed until you accept.
-
Land in your new workspace
You'll be taken straight to the Rank Authority dashboard with a free account already active. Your trial period, if you start one, begins when you choose a paid plan — not at install.
Already have a Rank Authority account? Sign in with that email during install instead of creating a new one, and your existing projects, scans, and history carry straight over.
03Install the pluginRequired for fixes
This is the bridge between the app and your site. Rank Authority can tell you what's wrong without it, but it cannot fix anything until the plugin is in place.
-
Open Integrations in Rank Authority
Click the account icon in the top right corner, open the dropdown, and select Integrations. Choose the CMS your site runs on — that's how you get the right plugin for your platform.
-
Install the plugin on your CMS
On WordPress, download the plugin file, then go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, install, and activate. On Shopify, Wix, Webflow, and GoDaddy, you'll be sent to that platform's authorization screen instead — approve the connection there.
-
Copy your connection key from the plugin
The key is generated by the plugin, not by Rank Authority. Once the plugin is activated on your CMS, open it and copy the connection key it shows you.
-
Verify the connection
Back in Rank Authority, return to Integrations, open your CMS connection, enter the key, and click Verify. Rank Authority will tell you whether the connection succeeded. If it doesn't, see Troubleshooting.
Take a backup first. The plugin writes to your site's meta tags, headings, alt text, schema, and internal links. Every change is logged and reversible from the Activity log, but a fresh backup before your first bulk approval is simply good practice.
04Add your website
A project is one website. Everything else — scans, fixes, blogs, reports — hangs off it.
-
Enter your domain
This is what lets Rank Authority scan your site. Double-check that the domain is yours and spelled correctly before you continue.
-
Confirm what Rank Authority found
The crawler reads your sitemap and follows internal links to build a list of your pages. Look it over and uncheck anything you'd rather leave alone.
-
Add your competitors
Open Add Competitors and add as many as you can research — the more the better. This drives your RA Score, which measures you against your real market rather than against national brands you'd never outrank, so a fuller competitor set gives you a more accurate picture.
-
Add your keywords
Open Add Keywords and enter the terms you actually want to win. Ten to twenty specific phrases beat a hundred vague ones. "ADU builder Orange County" is a keyword; "construction" is a category.
-
Add your AI prompts
Open AI Visibility and add the questions your customers would ask an AI engine before they buy — full questions, not keywords. These are what Rank Authority checks against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the rest to see whether you get cited.
05Your first scan
You don't have to start it. Your first scan runs automatically the first time you log in.
Rank Authority crawls every page in your site's page list and evaluates it against 200+ technical and on-page factors, then scores the site three ways:
| Score | What it measures |
|---|---|
| RA Score | Your search performance against the direct competitors you named, in your industry and location — not against global giants you'd never compete with. |
| Site Health | The technical foundation: page speed, mobile responsiveness, schema, structured data, crawlability, internal linking, SSL, and server response times. |
| SEO / GEO / AEO | Three separate scores for traditional search, generative engine visibility, and answer engine readiness. A site can be strong in one and weak in another. |
A first scan on a small site finishes in a few minutes. Large sites run longer and you'll get an email when results are ready — you don't need to keep the tab open. After that first scan, rescanning is fully automated and runs in the background; you can view results any time under Page Scans.
Expect a big number. First scans routinely surface hundreds or thousands of issues. That's normal and not a judgment on your site. Most are small, repeated across many pages, and fixed in bulk.
06Review and approve fixes
Nothing changes on your site until you say so. Every finding arrives with the fix already written.
Your dashboard's Optimizations To-Do list groups findings by type and marks severity. Open any group to see the affected pages, the current value, and the proposed replacement side by side.
You can work this list by hand, or hand it over entirely — see AI Autopilot.
Four ways to work through it
- Fix one page. Review the proposed change, edit the text if you want different wording, approve. Best for your homepage and money pages.
- Fix a group. Approve an entire issue type at once — every missing alt text, or every short meta description.
- Fix All Issues. Approves everything currently pending. Fast, and appropriate once you trust the output.
- Hand it to AI Autopilot. Turn Autopilot on and Rank Authority handles the queue for you — finding issues, writing the fixes, and applying them as they come up, with no approval step. Most people on Autopilot check in about once a month.
A sensible first pass, if you're approving by hand
- Start with schema markup and meta descriptions. High impact, essentially zero risk.
- Move to image alt text and title length. Same story.
- Handle internal links and duplicate content next — these have the largest effect on how AI engines understand your site.
- Save keyword cannibalization and URL changes for last, and read those individually. They affect existing rankings.
Everything is reversible. The Activity log records every change with a timestamp and the previous value. If a change doesn't sit right, roll it back from there.
07Connect Search Console
Optional, but it turns estimates into measurements.
Open Reports and choose Connect Search Console, then authorize with the Google account that owns your property. Once connected you'll see real clicks, impressions, average position, and Google's own index coverage next to Rank Authority's scores — which is how you prove the work is landing.
Two separate delays are at work here, and it's worth knowing both. Search Console itself reports on a lag of two to three days, so nothing you approve this morning shows up tonight. Beyond that, Google takes its own time to recrawl a changed page and reflect it in results — often two to three weeks, and on some sites as long as a month and a half. Slow movement in Search Console usually means Google hasn't gotten to your pages yet, not that the fixes didn't work.
08Turn on AI Autopilot
Autopilot is what turns Rank Authority from an audit tool into something that maintains your site without you.
Each module has its own Autopilot toggle, so you can automate the safe parts and keep manual control of the rest. With it on, Rank Authority will:
- Optimize new pages as you publish them, instead of waiting for your next scan
- Submit new and updated pages to Google as soon as they ship
- Build internal links into the right topic cluster automatically
- Re-check your AI visibility on a schedule and flag where you've lost ground
- Publish scheduled blog content if you've set up Blog Builder
Suggested approach. Spend an afternoon approving a few fixes by hand so you can see the quality of the output on your own site — then turn Autopilot on and leave it on. There's no reason to sit on it for weeks.
09What each module does
Ten modules in the sidebar. Here's what each one is for and when you'd open it.
AI SEO
Your on-page workbench. Titles, descriptions, headings, alt text, and schema — generated, queued, and applied on your approval.
AI Visibility
Tracks whether AI engines cite you when your market asks a buying question. Covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot.
RankFast
Compares your pages against the competitors ranking above you and shows the specific gaps, with Search Console clicks and impressions per page.
RankLink
Builds topic silos and pillar pages, recovers orphaned pages, and concentrates internal link equity where it converts.
Blog Builder
Writes and publishes SEO-structured articles on a schedule, each scored for SEO, GEO, and AEO before it goes live.
GBP
Connects your Google Business Profile so local signals feed into your scoring and recommendations.
Page Scans
Review completed crawls, inspect any individual page's findings, and control which pages are in scope.
Google Search Console
Connects your Search Console property so real clicks, impressions, average position, and index coverage sit alongside Rank Authority's own scores.
Reports
Every scan becomes a shareable, downloadable PDF audit. The archive shows score movement over time — this is your client deliverable.
Activity log
Every change, when it happened, what it replaced, and a rollback for each one.
10Plans and page limits
Plans are sized by how many pages your site has, not by how many features you want.
Every tier includes the full module set. What changes is your page allowance and your monthly quotas for AI SEO page optimizations, AI Visibility prompts, RankFast comparisons, blog posts, and RankLink silos. Current pricing lives on the pricing page.
Auto-upgrade
If your page count passes your tier's limit, your account moves to the next tier automatically so scanning and fixes never stop mid-project. Above 3,000 pages nothing auto-upgrades — larger sites are quoted individually. To opt out of auto-upgrade, call support.
Trials
Paid plans include a 7-day trial with every feature unlocked; the only limit is that it scans up to 100 pages. A credit card is required to start it, and you can cancel any time during the trial from your billing settings. If your site is 50 pages or under, the free plan does everything the paid plans do with no trial clock — a credit card is required either way.
11What to expect, and when
Search results move on Google's schedule, not yours. Here's an honest timeline.
| Window | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | Full scan completes. You see every issue, your RA Score, Site Health, and your SEO/GEO/AEO baseline. |
| Week 1 | First fixes approved and live on your site. Site Health starts climbing immediately — it measures your site, not your rankings. |
| Weeks 3–4 | Google typically finishes recrawling and reindexing changed pages. This is the realistic window for ranking movement to begin showing. |
| Months 2–3 | Internal linking and content depth compound. AI citation rates generally move on a slower curve than traditional rankings. |
On indexing. Rank Authority submits your pages to Google the moment they change. Google alone decides whether and when to index them — nobody can guarantee that timing. Three to four weeks is the realistic expectation, and any tool claiming instant indexing is selling you something it doesn't control.
12Troubleshooting
The handful of things that actually go wrong, and what fixes them.
The plugin won't connect
Check these in order: the connection key was pasted with no leading or trailing space; the plugin is activated, not just installed; your site is reachable over https://; and the domain in Rank Authority exactly matches your live site including the www.
If all four check out, a security layer is likely blocking the request. Allowlist Rank Authority in your security plugin, firewall, or CDN, then retry. On the hosted platforms — Shopify, Wix, Webflow, GoDaddy — re-run the authorization instead; a connection usually drops there because the authorizing account lost admin rights on the site.
My scan found far fewer pages than my site has
Usually the sitemap. Confirm yoursite.com/sitemap.xml loads and is current, check that robots.txt isn't disallowing sections of the site, and make sure you didn't exclude those pages during project setup. Pages behind a login are never crawled.
An approved fix didn't appear on my site
Nine times out of ten it's cache. Clear your site's cache and your CDN, then view the page source rather than the rendered page — meta tags and schema won't be visible on screen. If it's still missing, open the Activity log and confirm the change shows as applied rather than pending.
My AI Visibility numbers are all zero
Expected on a new project. Zero means AI engines aren't currently citing you for the queries you're tracking — which is the problem you installed this to solve. Add prompts your customers would actually type, publish content that answers them, and re-check on a monthly cadence. This metric moves slower than traditional rankings.
My scores went down after I made changes
Check the scan date first — a score drop alongside a jump in page count usually means the crawler found new pages that haven't been optimized yet, which is dilution rather than regression. If the page count is flat and the score fell, open the Activity log, find what changed in that window, and roll it back.
I need to move Rank Authority to a different site
Create a new project for the new domain rather than editing the existing one. Editing a project's domain orphans its scan history and you lose your baseline.
Still stuck?
Support is handled by the team that builds the product, not a ticket queue. If something here didn't work, tell us what you tried and we'll pick it up from there.
