Why is there no data yet?
A new workspace is empty for a handful of reasons, and all of them are quick to check.
A new workspace with nothing in it is normal for the first cycle. Here is how to tell normal from stuck.
What you'll learn
- The four reasons a workspace is empty
- What to check, in order
- What to expect and when
Cause 1: No active prompts
Nothing is checked until there are prompts. Open Prompts and confirm there are active ones. If onboarding proposed prompts and you did not accept any, the workspace has nothing to ask.
Cause 2: The first cycle has not run
Checks run on a cadence rather than on demand, so a workspace created an hour ago may simply not have been checked yet.
The honest expectation: give it a full cycle before concluding anything. The assistant tells you what it counted and when, so read the footer rather than guessing.
Cause 3: The profile does not match the business
If the business name, domain or markets are wrong, prompts get asked in the wrong place and citations do not match. Two specific traps:
- The legal entity instead of the trading name. Engines write what customers say, so match your profile to that.
- A market that is not where you sell. For a local business this is most of the value, and a wrong city produces answers naming businesses you have never heard of.
Cause 4: Coverage has not been allocated or has run out
If your wallet is empty, monitoring pauses rather than degrading silently. If a lane was never allocated at all, that is a fault on our side and it has its own distinct signal. See coverage and credits.
The checklist
| Check | Where |
|---|---|
| Active prompts exist | Prompts |
| Business name matches how customers say it | Settings |
| Markets are where you actually sell | Settings |
| Coverage available | Usage |
| At least one competitor added | Competitors |
What "empty" will look like even when everything is right
- Some surfaces excluded. Normal early on. An exclusion is not a zero.
- No verbatim sentences. You have not been cited yet. That is a finding, not a fault.
- No competitors discovered. They arrive from answers, so this fills in over the first cycles.
If it is still empty after a full cycle
Ask the assistant "What is my citation rate on each engine?" and read what it says it counted. If it reports reading your workspace and finding no prompts tracked, the problem is prompts. If it reports checks with no citations, the product is working and the finding is that you are not being named. That is the problem you came here to solve.
Try this in Outercite
Open Prompts and confirm the count of active prompts is what you expect. It is the single most common cause.
Related
Organisation quickstart
The five-day setup.
When a number is missing
Excluded, unmeasured and unmeasurable.
Add prompts
Getting prompts in.
Last updated on
Frequently asked questions
Short answers to the questions people ask in their first month: what is measured, how, on which surfaces, and why some numbers are deliberately missing.
Why is my citation rate low?
Work down the causes in the order they actually fail: access, extractability, authority, prompt quality, then content.