Getting Started with Bingly

Bingly is a two-in-one intelligence platform for modern SEO professionals. It tells you whether your brand or website is being cited by AI models when users ask questions - and it monitors Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter/X, and other communities for the real conversations happening around your keywords right now. Together, those two capabilities give you a complete picture of how your brand is perceived: by algorithms and by humans.

This guide walks you through everything you need to get your first results in under ten minutes.

What Bingly Does

AI Visibility Tracking

When someone types a question into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity, those systems synthesise an answer and cite a handful of sources. Being cited is the AI equivalent of ranking on page one. Not being cited means you are invisible - regardless of how well you rank in traditional Google search.

Bingly tests your domain against multiple AI models simultaneously. For each model, it records:

Whether your site was cited at all
How prominently it was mentioned (first citation, buried in a list, or absent)
Which competitors the model cited instead of you
What the model "thinks" your page is about - its internal characterisation of your content

This gives you the data to understand your AI visibility gap and close it.

Community Research and Intelligence

Alongside AI visibility, Bingly monitors live community feeds - Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter/X, and more - for posts that mention your brand, your keywords, or your competitors. Every post is automatically classified by intent: Is this someone ready to buy? Someone complaining about a competitor? Someone asking a question your content could answer?

The result is a real-time intelligence feed that replaces hours of manual searching with a single, filtered dashboard.

Quick Start: Your First Search in 3 Steps

Step 1 - Add a Keyword

On the main search screen, enter two things:

Keyword - the topic or query you want to test. This should be phrased the way a user would actually ask an AI: not "CRM software" but "what's the best CRM for small businesses". Natural-language queries produce more realistic and actionable results than short head terms.
Target domain - the website you want to track visibility for. Enter just the hostname, for example yourcompany.com. Do not include https:// or trailing slashes.

Both fields are validated before the search runs. Domains are checked against a strict allowlist - internal IP addresses, localhost references, and private network hostnames are blocked.

Step 2 - Pick Your Models and Sources

After entering your keyword and domain, you will see two sets of options:

AI Models - select which language models to query. Bingly tests your keyword across each selected model independently and returns separate scorecards. Running against multiple models is important: a brand can be well-cited by Claude but completely absent from Gemini's answers, or vice versa. The default selection covers the most widely used models; you can add or remove models depending on where your audience spends time.

Research Sources - select which community platforms to monitor: Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter/X, and any additional sources enabled on your plan. You can run AI Visibility only, Research only, or both at the same time.

Step 3 - Run the Search and Read Your Results

Click Run Search. Bingly fans out the query to each selected AI model and community source in parallel. Results stream in as they complete - you do not need to wait for every model to finish before you can start reading.

Results are organised into two tabs at the top of the results view: AI Visibility and Research.

Understanding Your First Results

The AI Visibility Tab

The AI Visibility tab contains one scorecard per model you tested. Each scorecard shows:

Citation status - a clear Cited / Not Cited indicator
Prominence - if cited, where in the response your domain appeared
Competitors cited - which other domains the model mentioned in the same answer
How AI sees your page - a direct excerpt from the model's response describing what your page is about

At the top of the tab, an Aggregate Visibility Score rolls up all the individual model results into a single percentage. A score of 100% means every tested model cited your domain; 0% means none did.

Do not be alarmed if your first score is low. Most websites - even well-optimised ones - are invisible to AI models for many queries. The score is a baseline; the recommendations panel beneath it tells you what to do next.

The Research Tab

The Research tab shows community posts that match your keyword across the selected sources. Each post is displayed with:

Source and author
Intent classification - a label such as "Buying Signal", "Competitor Mention", or "Question"
Recency - how long ago the post was published
A one-line AI summary of what the post is about

Click any post to open the detail panel on the right. The detail panel shows the full post context, the AI's analysis of its intent, and a Draft Reply button - which generates a suggested response you can customise and post directly into the community.

Key Concepts Glossary

AI Citation

An AI citation occurs when a language model includes your domain or brand name as a source in a generated answer. Citations vary in quality: some models explicitly link to a URL; others mention a brand name without a link; others paraphrase content without attribution. Bingly captures all three types and ranks them by prominence.

Visibility Score

The visibility score is a percentage calculated from all the AI models tested in a single search run. Each model contributes equally to the aggregate score. A model awards full points if your domain is cited prominently, partial points if it is cited but buried, and zero points if it is absent. See AI Visibility: How It Works for the full score calculation methodology.

Intent Classification

Every community post surfaced by the Research feature is automatically labelled with an intent class - a machine-learning-derived label that describes what the author is trying to do or say. The five classes are:

Intent	What it means
Buying Signal	The author is actively evaluating options or close to a purchase decision
Competitor Mention	The post discusses a competing brand by name
Brand Mention	The post references your tracked brand directly
Question	The author is asking for help or information your content could answer
General Discussion	Topical conversation that matches your keyword but has no specific commercial intent

Buying Signal

A buying signal is a community post classified as high purchase-intent. Typical examples include "which tool should I use for X", "I'm switching away from [competitor]", "looking for recommendations on Y". Buying signals are the highest-value posts in your Research feed - they represent real, in-market prospects who can be reached with a helpful, non-spammy reply.

Prompt Template

When Bingly queries an AI model for your keyword, it wraps your keyword inside a structured prompt template that mimics how a real user would ask the question. The template is calibrated per model - because Claude, Gemini, and GPT-4 respond differently to the same phrasing - to produce the most realistic citation results. You can read more about this in AI Visibility: How It Works.

Next Steps

Now that you have your first results, here is where to go next:

Understand your AI Visibility score in depth - AI Visibility: How It Works explains the scoring methodology, prompt templates, and how to interpret the "How AI sees your page" panel.
Get more from the Research feed - Research: Community Intelligence covers intent classification, draft replies, alerts, and the best workflows for using the feed as a sales intelligence tool.
Track your progress over time - Tracking and History explains how to read visibility trends, set up a regular tracking cadence, and export data for reporting.
Improve your AI visibility - if your score is below 50%, start with the Recommendations panel in your results view. For deeper guidance, see the guides on LLM SEO, improving AI visibility, and how AI models choose their sources.

A Note on Freshness

AI models have training cutoffs and do not always reflect the most recent version of your website. A page published last week may not appear in any model's answers yet - not because it is poorly optimised, but because the model has not seen it. Bingly's Research feed, by contrast, is real-time: posts from the past few hours appear as soon as they are indexed.

For AI visibility, the most actionable question is not "why isn't this new page cited?" but "why aren't my established, authoritative pages cited for the queries they rank for?" That is where the gap is almost always largest, and where Bingly's recommendations will have the fastest impact.