Parent orgs vs workspaces
One agency organisation, one workspace per client. What lives at each level, what is shared, and what never crosses between clients.
There are two levels and the split is worth learning properly, because it decides what your team sees, what your clients see, and what your allowance is spent on.
What you'll learn
- What lives at the agency level and what lives in a workspace
- Which things are pooled, and the consequences
- How context switching works
The two levels
| Agency organisation | Client workspace |
|---|---|
| Your team and their roles | The client's business profile |
| Your plan, allowance and invoice | Their prompts and topics |
| Your default branding | Their competitors |
| The portfolio view across clients | Their citations and answers |
| Their changes ledger | |
| Their reports, schedules and branding overrides |
What is pooled, and what that means
Coverage is pooled. One wallet at the agency level, spent by every workspace. A client with a large prompt set consumes more of it. This is usually an advantage, because quiet clients subsidise busy ones rather than sitting on unused plans, and it becomes a problem only if you have sold a very large prompt set at a small retainer.
Team membership is not pooled. An invitation is scoped, and a person sees the workspaces they belong to.
Branding cascades. Your agency default applies unless a workspace overrides it, so a client with their own colours and logo gets theirs and everyone else gets yours.
What never crosses
Nothing client-specific. One client's citations, prompts, competitors, changes and reports are visible only inside their workspace, and separation is enforced where the data is read rather than by hiding rows in the interface. See data isolation.
That includes the assistant. Ask a question inside a workspace and the answer is built from that workspace's data only.
Context switching
Agency users land on the portfolio rather than on the last client they had open, deliberately: your default question is "which of my clients needs me today", not "what was I doing in this one".
When you switch into a workspace, the assistant, the panels, the ledger and the reports are all that client's. Two habits:
- Read the workspace name before quoting a number.
- Read it again before approving a change, because approval captures a control against that client's baseline.
What agency admins see that workspace members do not
An agency owner or admin sees the portfolio: every client, their movement, their open changes. A member scoped to two workspaces sees those two and no portfolio-wide roll-up.
Try this in Outercite
Open the agency overview, then switch into a client workspace and ask the assistant "What is my citation rate on each engine?" Switch to another client and ask the same question. The answers should have nothing in common.
Related
Client permissions model
Who can see and change what.
Creating your first workspace
Setting one up.
Coverage and credits
How the pooled allowance is spent.
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