Abhord Quickstart Guide (Refreshed Edition — February 2026)
This practical guide helps new Abhord users get from zero to insights quickly. It reflects this year’s platform updates and market shifts in LLM behavior.
What’s new in this edition
- Broader multi‑LLM coverage and easier model rotation management.
- Faster refresh cadence for re-runs and improved de‑duplication of near‑identical answers.
- Clearer, audited definitions for Mentions, Sentiment, and Share of Voice, plus confidence bands.
- More flexible competitor sets (by brand, product line, and feature).
- Action playbooks to turn findings into on‑page, off‑page, and PR tasks.
1) Initial setup and configuration
- Create your workspace
- Add your organization name, primary domain(s), and preferred time zone.
- Invite teammates and assign roles: Admin (settings), Analyst (projects/reports), Viewer (read‑only).
- Connect owned sources
- Submit sitemap URLs and high‑value pages (product, docs, FAQs, pricing).
- Upload supplemental assets (PDFs, whitepapers) and link your help center or developer docs.
- Optional: connect social or app‑store profiles for entity resolution and mention disambiguation.
- Define your entities
- Add brand and product names, common misspellings, and abbreviations.
- Include disambiguation hints (e.g., “Aura, cybersecurity company—exclude perfume results”).
- Set tracking scope
- Regions/languages: start with your top 3 markets to keep budgets predictable.
- Model panel: select a balanced set of general models and at least one retrieval‑heavy model.
- Sampling and cost controls
- Recommended starting defaults: 5–10 survey questions, 20–30 runs per model per question, weekly cadence.
- Enable rate limiting and pause windows to avoid provider throttles.
- Notifications and compliance
- Configure alerts (first‑time mention, SoV swings, sentiment dips).
- Add safe‑list/deny‑list terms and privacy flags for sensitive entities.
2) Running your first survey across LLMs
- Frame the objective
- Example goals: “How do LLMs describe our product category?”; “Which vendors are recommended for [use case]?”; “What pain points are associated with our brand?”
- Draft your questions
- Mix discovery and decision queries:
- “What are the best tools for [task] in 2026?”
- “Who are the top providers of [category] for SMBs/enterprises?”
- “Compare [Brand] vs [Competitor] for [use case].”
- “What are common drawbacks of [Brand/Product]?”
- Set run parameters
- Models: choose 4–7 to start; include diversity (reasoning‑first vs retrieval‑first).
- Prompts: keep neutral phrasing; avoid words that bias for/against your brand.
- Variations: enable few‑shot and chain‑of‑thought variants for robustness (costs more; use sparingly).
- Scheduling: run on demand for a first pass; then shift to weekly or biweekly.
- Execute and QA
- Kick off the project; monitor