Creating Your First Workspace

A workspace in Outercite is a fully isolated environment for a single client. Keywords, competitors, reports, billing usage, and citation data all live inside that workspace and are never shared with other clients. This article walks you through creating one from scratch and explains exactly what isolation means in practice.

What you'll learn

• What a client workspace contains and what data stays isolated
• How to create a workspace and configure it for a new client
• How to switch between workspaces as you manage multiple clients

What is a workspace?

Think of a workspace as a private container for one client. When you open it, you see only that client's data. Nothing from your other clients is visible or accessible. Here is what lives inside each workspace:

The parent organisation holds billing and the cross-client portfolio view. Individual workspaces hold everything else.

For more on the relationship between the parent org and workspaces, see Parent Orgs vs Workspaces.

Before you start

You need a parent organisation already set up. If you have not done that yet, go to /onboarding?example=agency and follow the agency setup flow first. The Agency Quickstart covers the full first-day setup.

You also need the following details for your client:

• Their brand name (as it appears in AI search results)
• Their primary domain
• A list of 20-40 keywords to start tracking (you can expand later)
• Two or three competitor domains

Step 1: Create the workspace

1. From the agency portfolio at /agency, click New workspace.
2. Enter the client's brand name. Use the name as the AI engines know it. If a client trades as "Bloom Pharmacy" but their domain is bloomrx.com.au, use "Bloom Pharmacy" as the brand name. This affects how the verification pipeline identifies mentions.
3. Enter their primary domain. This is the domain the pipeline checks citations against.
4. Click Create workspace.

You will be dropped straight into the new workspace dashboard. It will show no data yet because the first verification run has not completed.

Step 2: Add keywords

Keywords (also called prompts, see the glossary) are the questions or phrases you want to track. They represent how a real user might ask an AI engine about your client's category.

1. Navigate to /prompts inside the new workspace.
2. Click Add keywords and enter your list. One prompt per line.
3. Save.

Good prompts are specific and intent-driven. For a Perth pharmacy, "best pharmacy near Subiaco" is a stronger prompt than "pharmacy". Cover a mix of local, buying-intent, and informational queries. The verification pipeline classifies each prompt by intent automatically (categories include types such as local, buying intent, informational, comparison, and branded, though the exact classification labels shown in the product may vary).

Step 3: Add competitors

Competitors give Outercite the context it needs to calculate share of voice (the proportion of AI citations in a category that go to your client versus rivals) and generate competitor threat scores.

1. Navigate to /competitors inside the workspace.
2. Click Add competitor and enter the competitor's domain.
3. Repeat for two or three competitors to start.

You can add more later. Outercite tracks competitor citation rates across the same keywords and engines as your client, so you can see exactly where they are winning citations that your client is not.

Step 4: Verify isolation

Once set up, the workspace is fully isolated. Here is a quick sanity check:

• Open a different client's workspace. Confirm you cannot see the new client's keywords or reports.
• Go back to the new workspace. Confirm the other client's data does not appear.

If you are a parent org Admin and you can see all workspaces by default, that is expected. Workspace-level team members can only see the workspaces they have been invited to. See Client Permissions Model for detail on role boundaries.

Step 5: Switching between workspaces

When you manage multiple clients, you switch workspaces from the agency portfolio at /agency. Each workspace shows its current portfolio health bucket (Needs Attention, Monitoring, or On Track) at a glance, based on the last two weeks of citation activity.

Click any workspace card to enter that client's environment. The navigation, dashboard, prompts, and reports all switch to that client's data automatically. You do not need to log out or use separate accounts.

What isolation covers

To be explicit, here is what is NOT shared between workspaces:

• Keywords and citation history
• Competitor lists and threat scores
• Reports and scheduled report configurations
• Alert settings (digest, surge alerts)
• Workspace-level team members

The only things that exist at the parent org level are billing, parent org Admins, and the aggregate portfolio view.

Try this in Outercite

Create your first client workspace now at /clients/add. You can be tracking keywords and seeing early citation data within a few hours.

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