Adding your site: what happens after you enter a URL

Entering a website address starts a background job that reads a sample of your pages, scores what it finds, and writes a report. This guide explains what you will see on screen while it runs, what Serpio actually fetches, and what exists in your workspace when it finishes.

Where you enter the address

Signed-in users see a two-part panel. Step 1 of 2 is Add your first website (or Add a new site when you already have one), with a Website URL field, a placeholder of acme.com, and an Analyze site button. The helper line says it: just the domain, Serpio adds https://. If the address fails validation, the field turns red with a message and the button stays disabled. To add another site later, open the domain switcher in the top bar and press Add site.

From the landing page, the hero field does the same job. Signed-out visitors are sent to sign up first. The address travels with them, and the dashboard shows Preparing your site report for a moment before the analysis screen takes over. Serpio can also run an analysis for a visitor who is not signed in, tied to a browser cookie that lasts 30 days. When that visitor signs in, those analyses are claimed and attached to the account automatically.

The six stages on screen

Step 2 of 2 is Analyzing your website. A progress bar and a six-icon rail track the job. The status line under the heading changes as the backend reports each stage.

What Serpio reads

• The homepage, fetched once, with a short sample of paragraph text for context.
• Your sitemap, if one is discoverable. From it Serpio samples up to seven URLs, favouring offering pages, a pricing page, an about page, a blog index, and a couple of articles. The homepage is always included.
• Each sampled page, for the HTML audit: headings, schema, FAQ and HowTo markup, hreflang, and similar signals.
• /llms.txt, to record whether it exists, plus public technical signals such as detected technology and page speed data.

Serpio does not log in anywhere, does not read pages behind authentication, and does not consult Google's index. The Based on N sampled pages note on the first setup screen tells you how many pages informed the analysis.

How long it takes, and what you can do meanwhile

Most sites finish in a few minutes. Slow servers stretch the review stage, because each audit waits on a real page fetch. You do not need to watch. The footer under the rail says so: Serpio is analyzing in the background, and you can switch to another site or come back later. While it runs, the domain switcher lists the site as Analyzing, and every sidebar item except Home shows Available once site analysis finishes when hovered.

What the analysis produces

Site Report

Three tabs under Site Report in the sidebar: Overview, Recommendations, and Audit details. The headline scores are Search readiness and AI citation readiness, each 0 to 100, with 85 and above strong, 70 to 84 good, 40 to 69 needs work, and below 40 critical. They audit sampled pages. They do not predict rankings or citations. See Reading your Site Report.

Detected content focuses

A primary focus and up to two secondary ones, each with a suggested cluster, name, seed keywords, and a Why Serpio suggested this focus rationale. You confirm or change them in setup.

Voice suggestions

Audience options, voice cues, and forbidden topics that appear as Suggested for your-domain menus in the voice step. They are starting points, not defaults.

Site index crawl

Queued at the end of the analysis. It builds Serpio's private index of your pages for brand context and internal linking. The Pages synced tile in setup shows the count and reads Still indexing… while it runs.

Sparse sites and sites that block crawlers

If the homepage cannot be fetched, the pipeline does not stop. It continues with empty signals, so scores come out low and the first setup screen shows a Needs your review badge with the note Some signals need your review. Detected focuses may be missing or generic. A site with very few pages behaves similarly: the sample is small, so the report has less to work with.

1. 1

   Check what blocked the fetch

   Common causes are a firewall or bot protection that challenges unknown user agents, a robots.txt that disallows everything, or a homepage that renders only through JavaScript. Fix what you can on your side.

2. 2

   Fill in the focuses by hand

   In the Review focus step, press Add your primary content focus and enter a name, cluster, and keywords yourself. Confirmation works the same way.

3. 3

   Re-analyze once the site is reachable

   Use the re-analyze action on the Site Report. New results replace the old ones. When to re-analyze explains the timing.

If the job itself fails, Home shows We couldn't finish analyzing your-domain with a Retry analysis button, and the domain switcher marks the site Analysis failed. Retrying starts a fresh job.