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Onboarding a domain

SERA onboarding is the guided setup that prepares your website for search engines and AI agents. Nitrogen finds your pages, processes them, and publishes SERA at the edge. Your live site for real visitors stays the same.

Setup usually takes less than 3 minutes of your time. Most of the work happens automatically.

Prerequisite#

  1. You have a Nitrogen account.
  2. You can sign in and open Get Started, or open SERA onboarding from your account.
  3. You know the domain visitors actually type, such as www.example.com.

What you get#

After onboarding, crawlers can receive a fully processed version of your pages. That helps search engines and AI assistants understand your content the first time they visit.

  • Real people still see your site from your origin.
  • Pages refresh on a rolling 30-day cycle.
  • Your home page and up to nine more pages are processed straight away.
  • You can turn on AI Agents and Brand AI during setup, or later.

Start setup#

  1. Open Get Started, then start SERA onboarding for your domain. You can also continue an in-progress domain from the task list.
  2. Enter the domain visitors use.
  3. Enter your brand name. This is how your brand should appear in AI answers.
  4. Optionally enable add-ons:
    • AI Agents (recommended). Serve processed pages to OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and other agents.
    • AI Brand Visibility. Track how OpenAI and Gemini describe, rank, and recommend your brand.
  5. Click Start setup.

If the domain is not on your account yet, Nitrogen adds it as part of this flow.

Your journey#

After you start, Nitrogen runs the steps below. You can leave the page. Setup keeps going.

StepWhat happens
Setting up your domainNitrogen checks how your site is served today and detects your CDN. If it cannot match a known CDN, it says so, and you pick the right tab yourself at the traffic step.
Finding your pagesNitrogen looks for your sitemap and counts the pages it can use. It shows the sitemap it picked, the page count, and any other sitemaps it found.
Scheduling your pagesA page group named Default is created. Pages refresh on a rolling 30-day cycle.
Processing your top pagesYour home page, plus up to nine more pages from the sitemap, are processed first. Each URL shows as processing or processed.
Publishing to the edgeYour SERA configuration is published to the Nitrogen edge.
Verified the edge connectionNitrogen confirms the edge answers for your domain.
Connect your trafficYou add a snippet at your CDN, then verify. This is the main step that needs you.

If your sitemap cannot be used#

Setup does not stop. Nitrogen falls back to your home page and tells you why.

What you seeWhat it means
Sitemap is blockedNitrogen found sitemaps but could not fetch them. The sitemaps it tried are listed.
Sitemap not validThe sitemaps were reachable but hold no usable HTML pages.
No sitemap detectedNo sitemap was found for the domain.

In each case only your home page is processed to begin with. Add more pages or a sitemap later from Rules > Pages.

Connect your traffic#

Crawlers reach SERA only after you point crawler traffic to the Nitrogen edge. Visitors still go to your origin.

  1. Copy the snippet for your CDN. Tabs include Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai, NGINX, Apache, NodeJS, and Other.
  2. Add it at your CDN or origin. Change the tab if the detected provider is not right.
  3. Allowlist SERA at your origin. SERA uses dynamic IPs, so header allowlisting is required. Allow:
    • x-nv-app = SERA
    • x-nv = true
    • x-nv-access-key = the key shown in the wizard
  4. Start with the testing bot list. Switch to live search bots, then AI bots, when you are ready.
  5. Click I’ve added it, verify.

Do the allowlisting before you verify. The check is a real request to your domain from Nitrogen. It identifies itself as a crawler and carries x-nv-app and your x-nv-access-key, so a CDN or origin that blocks those headers fails the check even when your snippet is correct.

When verification succeeds, the traffic step turns complete. If it does not, the wizard tells you which of the two happened:

  • SERA did not answer. Your domain is reachable, but crawler traffic is not routed to SERA yet. Deploy the snippet at your CDN and check again.
  • We could not reach your domain. The test request did not complete. Your snippet is untouched, so try again in a moment.

If your domain is already live on Nitrogen, you do not need a snippet. The wizard shows You’re live on Nitrogen and asks you to Publish SERA to your live domain instead. Click Publish to the edge to turn SERA on for crawlers. The traffic step then completes on its own, because crawler traffic already reaches Nitrogen. Visitor traffic is unchanged.

Provider-specific integration guides:

If SERA requests are blocked at origin, see SERA scenarios .

AI Agents#

AI Agents let assistants such as OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini read the same processed pages that search crawlers get.

  • The option is on by default when you start setup.
  • Turning it on during onboarding enables every agent Nitrogen supports, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Brave, Kagi, Mistral, NotebookLM, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Bing.
  • If you skipped it, you can click Turn on AI Agents after SERA is ready.
  • When it is on, the setup screen shows 10+ AI Agents activated.
  • You can change the agent list later from Configure SERA for domain .

Brand AI#

Brand AI (shown as AI Brand Visibility at start) shows how assistants talk about your brand.

  1. Enable it at start, or click Set up Brand AI after SERA is ready.
  2. Nitrogen drafts a summary, brand identifiers, questions, and competitors.
  3. Confirm or edit those details, then click Generate report.
  4. The first report runs in the background. You can leave and come back.
  5. When it is ready, open Read your brand report.

You can skip Brand AI and set it up later. You can also change identifiers, questions, and competitors later in AI Brand Visibility .

The report answers questions such as:

  • Where you rank for important prompts
  • How assistants describe you
  • How often you are mentioned versus others
  • Who gets recommended instead of you

After you are set up#

On the You are set up screen you can:

  • Open View SERA analytics to see crawler traffic and processed pages
  • Finish Connect your traffic if you have not verified yet
  • Turn on AI Agents or Brand AI if you skipped them
  • Go back to Get Started

Get Started also lists leftover work across domains, such as start onboarding, continue setup, connect traffic, turn on AI Agents, or set up Brand AI.

Need help#

The wizard includes Need help? with support at support@n7.io . The team can walk you through setup.

Notes#

  • Real visitors are not sent through SERA by this flow. Only crawler traffic is forwarded.
  • When Nitrogen is your CDN, SERA runs on your domain directly. When another CDN is in front, SERA is served from your Nitrogen endpoint and your CDN forwards crawler traffic to it. That is why the snippet is needed only in the second case.
  • Processing top pages can keep running after the rest of setup looks complete. That is expected.
  • You can leave during setup. Return from Get Started or from SERA onboarding for that domain.
  • Manual SERA configuration (page groups, condition groups, and feature toggle) is covered in Configure SERA for domain . Use onboarding when you want Nitrogen to do that work for you.