Welcome to Yolando! We're excited to help you take control of your brand's narrative in the new age of AI. This guide will walk you through the essential first steps and explain how to get the most out of the platform.

AI is The New Front Door for Your Brand

AI has become the new search bar. Nearly 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly, and they're asking for answers, not just links. That first AI-generated response is your brand’s first impression.

If you’re not in the answer, you’re invisible.

This new landscape is called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and it’s already impacting every brand across every industry. 

The good news? With Yolando, you’ve taken the first and most important step to shape your AI narrative, outpace competitors, and become the brand AI recommends.

A Quick Note on Terminology
Before you dive in, we highly recommend reviewing our Yolando Glossary. Understanding key terms like Discoverability, Share of Voice, and Prompts will help you get the most value out of the platform from day one.

Your First 3 Steps to Success

To unlock the full power of Yolando, complete these three foundational steps. This initial setup will fuel all the insights and recommendations you receive.

Step 1: Confirm Your Topics and Prompts

This is the bedrock of your Yolando experience. The topics and prompts you define are the exact questions the system will ask major AI platforms to track your brand's discoverability and performance.

• Why it's important: All your data on brand discoverability, share of voice, and competitive ranking is based on how AI responds to these core prompts.
  
  

• Action: Set up in onboarding, or go to Knowledge > Prompt Manager to review, add, or refine your list.

Step 2: Choose Your Tracked Competitors

Identify the key competitors you want to monitor. Yolando will continuously research their content and web presence to provide you with fresh, daily insights..

• Why it's important: All your metrics are ranked and benchmarked against this list. 
  
  

• Action: Setup in onboarding, or go to Knowledge Base > Competitors to add the brands you want to track – you will also be able to discover new competitors that appear in AI responses. 

Step 3: Set Up Your Brand Voice

This is the key to generating high-quality, on-brand content. A well-defined brand voice ensures that every content piece that Yolando creates sounds like it came directly from your team.

• Why it's important: Without a strong brand voice profile, generated content can feel generic. Be specific! Include terms to use, phrases to avoid, product details, and your desired tone.
  
  

• Action: Go to Settings > Brand Voice to create and refine your voice profile.

How Yolando Helps You Win: The Insights → Action Workflow

Yolando is built on a simple yet powerful three-part workflow designed to give you a complete toolkit for mastering AEO.

📖 1. Knowledge Base: Your Strategic Intelligence Base

First, Yolando builds a deep understanding of your brand, competitors, and industry. This is your central hub for all contextual data.

• Chat with Your Brand's AI: Ask questions, get strategic advice, and generate content with a custom AI model that understands your unique business context.
  
  

• Track Competitors: Get a real-time feed of competitor activities, including new content they publish and where they are being mentioned.
  
  

• Upload Artifacts to Build Your Knowledge Base: Upload brand guidelines, product one-pagers, and other key documents to your custom AI Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system.
  
  

• Define Brand Voice: Set the tone, style, and rules for all future content generation.
  
  

• Set Up Topics & Prompts: Define the core questions that drive all platform insights.

💡 2. AI Discoverability: Measure What Matters

Next, Yolando tracks how your brand is being represented across major AI platforms, giving you clear, actionable metrics.

• Core AEO Metrics: Measure your brand discoverability, share of voice, and reputation across AI responses.
  
  

• Citation Tracking: See which of your web pages and which third-party sources are being cited by AI platforms, and understand how they shape the narrative.
  
  

• Competitor Benchmarking: Compare your performance across key metrics with your tracked competitors.
  
  

• Competitor Impersonation: See the entire platform from a competitor's point of view to better understand their strengths and weaknesses.

▶️ 3. Marketing Studio: Turn Insight into Influence

Finally, Yolando helps you turn what you've learned into concrete actions that improve your AI presence and win over customers.

• Generate On-Brand Content: Use your custom brand voice(s) to create high-quality, relevant articles in minutes.
  
  

• Get Smart Content Recommendations: Receive personalized suggestions for new articles based on gaps in your AI narrative. Automatically generate an outline, then a full draft.
  
  

• Optimize Existing Content: Get recommendations for improving your current content to increase its chances of being cited by AI.
  
  

• Discover Outreach Opportunities: Find relevant third-party websites where you can earn valuable mentions and backlinks.
  
  

• Surface Social Opportunities: Identify relevant Reddit threads and social conversations where your brand can engage and shape the narrative.
  
  

• Manage Content In Your Content Hub: Draft, iterate, and manage all your content in one centralized place.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Why do I need Yolando?

As consumers shift from traditional search engines to AI-powered answer engines, your brand needs to show up in the answers to stay discoverable and influence how audiences perceive and trust your expertise. Yolando is the first platform designed specifically to help you monitor, manage, and optimize your presence in this new AI-driven ecosystem, ensuring you don't become invisible.

Q: How is AEO/GEO different from SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on ranking your web pages within a list of links on a search engine’s results page. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focuses on influencing the single, synthesized answer that an AI model generates. It's a new discipline that requires tracking AI responses, sentiment, and source citations, not just keyword rankings.

Q: Why can’t I just use my SEO tool for this?

Traditional SEO tools are built for a world of search engines, links and web crawlers. They are not designed to track, measure, or analyze the conversational responses from large language models like ChatGPT. Yolando is purpose-built to provide insights unique to the generative AI landscape.

Q: How does on-brand content generation work? Will it be good?

Our content generation is designed to avoid "AI slop." The quality depends directly on the strength of your Brand Voice and the resources you upload to your Knowledge Base (RAG). By grounding the AI in your brand’s unique guidelines, data, and context, Yolando creates content that remains relevant, precise, and true to your brand.

Q: How long does it take to get started?

You can complete the three foundational steps (Topics and prompts, Competitors, Brand Voice) in under 15 minutes. Once set up, Yolando will begin gathering data immediately, and you will start seeing your first insights within 24 hours.

Q: Can I track multiple brands?

This depends on your subscription plan. Please check Settings → Billing & Payments or our pricing page for details on adding more brands to your account.

Q: Can I change my topics later?

Yes. You can add, remove, or edit your topics and prompts at any time in your settings. Your dashboards and insights will update accordingly. Need more detail? Visit the Topics & Prompts documentation page for step-by-step guidance.

Q: What if I don’t know all my competitors yet?

Start with the ones you know. You can add or remove competitors anytime. Yolando will also automatically surface all brands mentioned in AI answers in your Knowledge Base. If you see a new competitor appear that you want to start monitoring, you can add them to your tracked list with a single click.

Q: Can I switch my plan later?

Yes. You can upgrade your plan or switch from a Monthly to an Annual subscription at any time in your billing settings.

Q: Where do I manage my billing?

You can manage your subscription, view invoices, and update your payment method by going to Settings > Billing & Payments in the Yolando app.

Q: How does the 7-day money-back guarantee on annual plans work?

If you're not satisfied within the first 7 days of your annual plan, simply contact our support team to request a refund. We'd appreciate any feedback you're willing to share to help us improve, but it is not required.