Getting started

This page takes you from an empty screen to your first finished report.

Your first report

You don’t have to build your first report by hand. When you sign up, Palmata starts one for you automatically — the report list greets you with a welcome screen while it’s prepared, and your first audit appears there within a few minutes. Use that one to find your feet, then build your own with New Report below.

A short guided tour points out the main parts of the app the first time through. Step through it with the arrow keys or the on-screen controls, or skip it — you can always come back to any view on your own.

Run a report

Click New Report to open the report builder. Start with the settings that define what Palmata will audit.

Report type — choose the depth of report you need. The builder shows the credit cost for the selected type before you submit it.

Brand name — the name buyers use for you. What you’d expect to hear in an answer.

Domain(s) — your website. Add more than one owned domain with a comma or the Enter key. Include every domain you own that publishes content buyers might read, so pages on any of them count as yours.

Answer Engines — choose which available answer engines run the report. The options depend on your organization’s plan and configuration.

Steering instructions (optional) — up to 100,000 characters telling the audit where to aim. “Focus on enterprise SaaS positioning.” “We sell to legal teams, not IT.” Leave it blank and the audit reads your market on its own. Add it when you already know the corner you care about.

Refine the plan

Choose Update after changing the steering instructions. Palmata summarizes how it interpreted them and prepares the plan settings you can adjust before building the report.

Describe what you want to learn, either as an instruction or a question. “How are our running shoes doing?” focuses the report on running shoes. “How do we look to first-time runners?” explores that audience’s needs, buying criteria and naturally phrased questions. If you supply a reference article or assessment, explain how it should guide the analysis. Palmata researches its stated criteria and distinguishes them from inferred questions.

You can also request a particular question voice, such as “write the prompts in a Gen Z customer voice.” Palmata interprets the audience and wording conventions; you do not need to list each detail separately. Examples are optional. The perspective applies to search questions, while the report keeps its usual style.

Use Add market filter or Add custom filter to organize the finished report around the segments you care about. You can also let Palmata generate additional filters and organize prompts by the Discovery, Evaluation, and Decision stages of the buyer journey.

Enter a country, city, or region for a market’s geography. Palmata resolves that location when you choose Preview Prompts or Build report, preserving a narrower city or region. Editing or saving a draft keeps your entered wording; if a location is ambiguous, clarify it before continuing.

Preview Prompts generates sample topics and questions so you can check the report’s focus before committing. The button shows the preview cost; generating a preview spends those credits.

Prompt previews run as background jobs; a temporary connection loss does not stop generation, and completed previews are saved with their plans. If generation cannot finish within three minutes, it stops and refunds the preview charge. Try again with the same settings.

Open Templates & Drafts to load settings from an earlier report plan or a saved draft. Choose Save to drafts if you want to return to the current setup later.

Build or request the report

Choose Build report when the setup is ready. The button shows the report’s credit cost, and submitting it spends those credits — see Billing & Credits for how that’s counted. If your role can’t build reports directly, choose Request report to send the setup to an admin for approval instead.

The confirmation lets you review or edit the report name before returning to the report list; this changes how you identify the report, not its content. If recurring reports are available to your organization, you can also review or edit the rerun schedule there. Palmata notifies you when the report is ready, usually within an hour. Reports requested by members wait for admin approval first.

While it builds

A report takes a while to build — this is deep research, not a quick lookup. You don’t have to sit and watch. Leave the page and come back; it keeps running.

If you do watch, the Analyzing [Brand] screen shows three things: an estimated time remaining, a live feed of what the research is doing right now, and a checklist of the stages it moves through. The feed is there so you can see the work happening, not so you have to follow every line.

Palmata checks generated questions against your requested scope, language, and voice. Questions that fail correction are replaced with fresh questions and checked again. Any that still fail review are excluded, and the report continues with the approved questions. The activity feed shows the reduced question count when this happens.

Report states

Back on the report list, each report carries a badge:

• Running — building now. Open it to watch the progress screen. Reports remain in this state while Palmata finishes the work, even when progress updates pause temporarily.
• Failed — something stopped it. Open it for two choices: Resume picks up where it left off; Restart runs it again from the top.
• Cancelled — you stopped it. The same Resume and Restart options are there.
• Private / Shared — a finished report, and whether anyone else in your org can see it.

When a report finishes, open it and start with Brand Perception. If this is your first one, read Concepts first — it’s the difference between looking at the charts and knowing what they’re telling you.