Short answer: a website you control, and a Google account that can see it in Search Console. Everything else is optional.
Required
A site we can reach. Any URL. It does not need to be built with anything in particular.
Google Search Console access, ideally. PageOptimized works without it, but a large part of the product reads your real search data — what people typed, what they clicked, what they skipped. Without it you are working from estimates where you could be working from facts.
You need a verified property in Search Console under the Google account you sign in with. If you have never set that up, do it first; it is free and takes a few minutes on Google's side.
Helpful, not required
- A sitemap. Speeds up crawling and finds pages that nothing links to. We fall back to following links if there is not one.
- A list of competitors. Makes AI visibility and market analysis sharper immediately.
- Analytics access. Useful for tying rankings to outcomes, not needed to get started.
Things that will slow you down
An aggressive firewall or bot rule. If your host blocks unknown crawlers, our audit gets refused the same way an unfamiliar bot does. Allowlisting us takes one rule — see my site audit failed or only crawled a few pages.
A staging site behind a password. We cannot crawl what we cannot reach. Point us at production, or open a path.
Expecting history you have not collected yet. Rank tracking starts the day you add a keyword. Nobody can sell you last year's positions for a term you were not tracking.
Next
- Your first week in PageOptimized
- Connecting Google Search Console