What CMO.ie does
The 30-second version. If you only read one section, read this one.
- What problem does CMO.ie solve?
- Customers increasingly ask AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) for recommendations instead of typing a Google query. CMO.ie tracks whether your brand is mentioned in those answers, where competitors are mentioned and you aren't, and what to publish or change to start showing up.
- Is this just SEO?
- No. Traditional SEO optimises for Google's blue-link results. AI search engines synthesise answers from a different mix of sources, weight Irish publishers differently, and don't index a page just because Googlebot can read it. We track the AI side specifically, with a separate methodology — it complements, not replaces, your existing SEO work.
- Who's it for?
- Irish brands with a digital footprint who care about being recommended by AI. Most useful if you have at least a basic website + some product/service pages, and you compete in a category customers research before buying. Agencies use it to manage multiple client brands from one workspace.
- What's the shortest path to value?
- Sign up, create a project for your brand, fill in (or auto-extract) the brand profile, click Generate suggestions to get ~10 customer-style prompts, click Generate full set if you want 30-50. Once prompts are saved, the daily run picks them up and we check each prompt against the AI engines on your plan. Within 24-48 hours you have a real visibility baseline.
Getting started
- How do I sign up?
- Visit /signup, give us your name, company, email and password. We provision a trial organisation for you with one project, one prompt, and three AI models — enough to see the product working before you pick a paid plan.
- What happens during onboarding?
- After signup we walk you to /onboarding which guides you through: (1) confirming your brand name + website, (2) auto-extracting a brand profile from your homepage, (3) seeing 10 suggested prompts, (4) picking competitors, (5) running your first daily check. Total time: ~5 minutes.
- Do I need an API key from Anthropic / OpenAI / Google?
- Trial accounts: yes (BYOK). Paid plans: no — we use our managed keys by default. Power users on paid plans can switch to their own keys via Settings → API Keys if they want full control over spend or want to run more checks than their plan covers.
- Can I add more than one brand?
- Starter is one project. Pro is three. Advanced is unlimited. Agency tier is built around multi-client management with a credit pool that can be allocated across client projects.
Prompts
Prompts are the questions your customers might ask AI when researching your category. They're the unit of measurement — every check runs each prompt against each model.
- What's a good prompt?
- A natural question a real customer would type — not a keyword string. "Best digital agencies in Dublin for a B2B SaaS launch?" is good. "digital agency dublin" is not. We auto-suggest 10 prompts based on your brand profile so you don't have to write them from scratch.
- How is the suggested-prompts list built?
- Claude reads your structured brand profile (segment, audience, products) — never the raw HTML — and generates 10 conversational prompts split across awareness (~3), consideration (~4), and decision (~3) intents. We hard-lock to your stated industry so you don't get prompts about adjacent businesses.
- What's the difference between Generate suggestions and Generate full set?
- Generate suggestions returns ~10 prompts, fast. Generate full set returns 30-50 covering the broader funnel + scores each one's importance (1-5) + maps each to its closest plain-English Google query so you can see the keyword volume behind it. Use Generate suggestions for a quick start; use Generate full set when you want comprehensive coverage.
- Can I write my own prompts?
- Yes — the Add your own input lives directly under the suggestion list. We'd recommend starting with the suggester even if you intend to override it; the AI tends to phrase prompts in customer language better than we do.
- How many prompts can I track?
- Trial: 1. Starter: 25. Pro: 50. Advanced: unlimited. Agency: unlimited. The cap is on active prompts; archived prompts don't count.
Daily runs + visibility
- How often do you check my prompts?
- Trial: 2 runs per month. Starter: 4. Pro: 30. Advanced + Agency: unlimited. A run fires every active prompt against every selected model, captures the response, parses citations, and computes share-of-voice across your brand + competitors.
- Which AI models are checked?
- ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, Gemini (Google), and Google AI Overviews. Trial includes 3 of those; Starter 2; Pro 4; Advanced + Agency 5.
- What's share-of-voice?
- Across all the prompt × model checks in a run, what share of mentions belonged to your brand vs each tracked competitor. It's the headline number that tells you whether you're improving against the field over time.
- Why does the result for the same prompt change?
- AI models are stochastic — they don't return identical answers every time. We run each prompt multiple times where the plan allows it and aggregate. Over a month, the noise smooths out and the real trend emerges.
Brand profile
- Why does the brand profile matter so much?
- Every downstream feature — prompts, action plans, briefs, monthly playbooks — uses the brand profile as ground truth for what your business actually is. If the profile says you're a digital agency, suggestions will be agency-customer questions. If it's wrong, everything downstream is wrong. The profile is the most important thing you tell us.
- How is the brand profile created?
- On project creation, we fetch your homepage, parse the visible text, and ask Claude to fill out five fields: short description, market segment, brand identity, target audience, products/services. You see it before it's saved and can edit any field.
- What if the auto-extract gets it wrong?
- Two paths. (1) Click Re-extract — most failures are transient (rate limit, JS-only homepage, redirect). (2) Edit the fields manually — you know your business better than the model, and the manual version is what every downstream feature uses.
- Why isn't extraction working?
- Most often: your site is behind Cloudflare bot protection, or the homepage is JS-rendered with no server HTML, or it's a redirect to a country-specific domain. The error message usually tells you which. Editing the profile manually unblocks you regardless.
Gaps + actions
- What's a gap?
- A specific domain or URL the AI models keep referencing when answering your prompts where competitors are mentioned and you aren't. The Gap Analysis page ranks them by opportunity — high-traffic sources where you're absent are where you have the most to gain by appearing.
- What's an action plan?
- Click Generate plan on the Actions tab and we run a three-Claude pipeline (Gap Analyst → Strategist → Brief Writer) that turns your top gaps into a prioritised list of moves. Each action has effort + impact ratings, root-cause analysis, and concrete steps.
- What's a brief?
- A click-to-generate content brief targeting a specific gap. Tells you who the audience is, what to write, what to include, and what voice to use — so you (or your writer) can publish a piece of content that has a real chance of earning the citation you're missing.
- What's the action tier on each plan?
- Trial + Starter: 'gaps' (gap identification only). Pro: 'strategy' (gaps + prioritised plan). Advanced + Agency: 'full' (gaps + plan + briefs + draft + polish requests).
SEO audits
- What's the SEO audit?
- A 9-phase deep audit of your site — keyword landscape, on-page review, content gaps, technical SEO, AI search resilience, competitor benchmarking, backlinks, local SEO, prioritised action plan. Calibrated for the Irish market. Delivered as a markdown report you can share with your team.
- How long does it take?
- 60-120 seconds end-to-end. The page shows a stage-by-stage progress indicator (crawling → reading meta tags → checking Core Web Vitals → mapping keywords → writing the report). Safe to close the tab — the audit keeps running and shows up in your list when done.
- How much does it cost?
- Pro: 1 free audit per month. Advanced: 3 free per month. Trial / Starter / Agency overflow: €49 per audit. Agency tier includes 1 per active client project per month.
- Why did my audit fail?
- Most common: your site blocked our crawler (Cloudflare, Webflow, or a 403). The audit row shows status 'unavailable' with the specific reason. Some sites also fail mid-audit when PageSpeed Insights returns transient errors — a re-run usually works.
Monthly playbooks
- What's a monthly playbook?
- On the 1st of each month we generate a one-pager for every active project — the three highest-leverage moves to make this month based on the previous 30 days of data. Delivered to every team member's email + viewable inline at /admin/playbooks.
- How are the three moves chosen?
- Top gaps + visibility deltas + share-of-voice changes get fed to Claude with the brand profile. Claude returns the moves in CMO.ie house voice (practical, Dublin-inflected, no corporate filler). Each move has a specific 'do this by Friday' task — not generic 'consider improving content' advice.
- Can I regenerate a playbook?
- Yes — admins can force-regenerate from /admin/playbooks. Useful if Claude misread the data or the prompt template changed. Doesn't trigger a fresh email send by default.
Crawlability tool
- What's the crawlability tool?
- Free, login-free check at /crawlability. Tests whether 40+ AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleBot, etc.) are allowed by your robots.txt + can fetch a sample URL. Tells you which AI engines can actually read your site — a precondition for ever showing up in their answers.
- Why is crawlability free?
- We use it as a marketing top-of-funnel — give value before asking for an email. If your site is bot-blocked, no amount of CMO.ie tracking will help; better you find out for free.
Plans + billing
Pricing is on /pricing — this section answers the questions the pricing table can't.
- What's a check?
- One prompt run against one AI model = one check. If you have 50 prompts × 3 models × 30 runs/month, that's 4,500 checks/month on Starter. Each plan has a soft total-checks cap (most plans are unlimited; Trial is capped at 10).
- Do failed checks count against my limits?
- No. Only successful checks count. If a model API errors out, we retry with backoff and eventually skip — that doesn't burn your runsPerMonth allowance.
- How does cancellation work?
- Cancel anytime from Settings → Billing. Access stays live until the end of your current billing period. We don't pro-rate refunds, but data is preserved for 30 days after cancellation in case you change your mind.
- Do I get a discount for paying yearly?
- Email hello@howl.ie — annual deals are case-by-case at the moment, especially for agency tier. No public discount code.
- What if I exceed my plan's prompt limit?
- You can't add the next prompt — the form blocks it. Either upgrade your plan or archive prompts you no longer need. Archived prompts preserve their history but don't count towards the cap.
Agency tier
- What's different about Agency?
- Multi-client management. One workspace, many client projects, with a credit pool that can be allocated across clients (instead of a per-project plan). BYOK by default — your Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini keys, your spend, your control. Includes the MCP server + REST API on Scale tier and above.
- What's the credit pool?
- 1 prompt × 1 model × 1 day = 1 credit. Pre-allocate credits across client projects monthly so a high-priority client gets more frequent checks than a maintenance one. See /agency for the full model.
- Can my clients log in to see their own data?
- Not yet on the customer side — the agency tier is built around the agency operator running it. White-labelled client logins are on the roadmap but not v1.
Data + privacy
- Where's my data stored?
- Supabase (Postgres) in the EU region (Frankfurt) for all customer data. Vercel hosts the app — also EU regions. We don't store your AI provider's responses any longer than needed for trend analysis (90 days by default; longer on Advanced + Agency).
- What's sent to the AI providers?
- Just the prompt text + the basic context the run engine needs (brand name + market). We never send your customer data, your team's emails, or anything outside what's needed to run the visibility check.
- Is CMO.ie GDPR-compliant?
- Yes. Howl.ie (Ireland) is the data controller; we publish our processing basis at /privacy. Subject access requests and right-to-erasure requests are answered within 30 days; email privacy@howl.ie.
- Do you sell or share my data?
- No. We don't sell to third parties, don't share data across customer accounts, and don't run ads inside the product. Subprocessors (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Vercel, Supabase, Stripe) are listed in /privacy.
Account
- How do I add a teammate?
- Settings → Team → Invite. They get an email with a sign-up link tied to your organisation. New teammates default to 'member' role; only owners can grant admin.
- How do I change my password?
- Settings → Account → Reset password. Or use the 'Forgot password' link on /login if you can't sign in.
- How do I delete my account?
- Settings → Account → Delete account. This permanently removes your organisation, projects, prompts, history, and team. We don't keep a soft-delete copy.
- Where do I report a bug?
- Email hello@howl.ie or use the chat icon in the bottom-right of the dashboard if it's enabled. We aim to respond within one business day; bugs go straight to the engineering backlog.