Abhord Quickstart Guide (Refreshed 2026 Edition)
Who this is for: New Abhord users who want a fast, reliable way to learn what large language models (LLMs) say about their brand, competitors, and category—and turn that into action.
What’s new in this edition
- Stratified model mixes: guidance for balancing frontier and lightweight/open-source models.
- Updated defaults: lower temperatures for recall tasks; improved cost caps and throttling.
- Mentions v2: better aliasing, deduplication, and confidence scoring.
- Sentiment v2: domain-aware, neutral-friendly scoring with adjustable thresholds.
- Share of Voice (SOV) refresh: rolling 28‑day window, direct vs. inferred mentions, and per-model weighting.
- Competitor Tracker upgrades: alias manager, false‑positive suppression, and entrant detection.
- Action integrations: cleaner exports to Slack, Sheets, Jira/Linear, HubSpot.
1) Initial setup and configuration
- Create a workspace and roles
- Add teammates; assign roles (Admin, Analyst, Viewer).
- Enable SSO if available; create per-project API tokens for least-privilege access.
- Connect integrations
- Slack for alerts, Google Sheets/BigQuery for exports, Jira/Linear for issue creation, HubSpot/Salesforce for handoffs.
- Define entities and aliases
- Add your brand, products, competitors, and common aliases (spelling variants, abbreviations).
- Include negative keywords to suppress false positives (e.g., “apple the fruit” for Apple).
- Choose model roster and controls
- Start with a stratified set: 2–3 frontier models, 2 cost‑efficient APIs, 1–2 popular open-source models via your preferred gateway.
- Defaults: temperature 0.2–0.4 for recall/listing tasks; 0.6–0.7 for ideation.
- Set monthly cost caps and per‑run throttles; choose regions to satisfy data policies.
- Enable PII redaction and domain-specific profanity/guardrail handling.
- Project templates
- Use “Brand + Category Pulse” to get mentions/SOV; “Competitor Delta” for movements; “Messaging Tests” for copy evaluations.
2) Run your first survey across LLMs
- Frame the objective
- Example: “Identify the top 10 CRM tools for SMBs, reasons they’re chosen, and how AcmeCRM compares.”
- Build the prompt pack
- System message: define evaluator role and criteria.
- User prompts: 3–5 variations covering direct, comparative, and scenario prompts.
- Add disambiguation instructions (“If unsure, say ‘unknown.’ Do