# The dashboard, page by page
> What each dashboard screen shows, what you can do there, and when to open it.
Source: https://dispatchseo.com/docs/dashboard
All docs in one file: https://dispatchseo.com/llms-full.txt
The sidebar groups pages by what they're for, not how they're built:
Performance, Content, Growth, System - with Home on its own at the top and
Settings (plus Billing on cloud) pinned at the bottom. This page walks
through every one of them, in that order.
## Home
`/dashboard` is the one screen built to answer "what needs me right now."
Everything else on it is either a status readout or a decision waiting on
you.
What it shows, top to bottom:
- An agent status pill (building, guides or tools queued, or an alert) once
the pipeline is wired in and at least one builder automation is on.
- Any banners worth interrupting you for: a failing background job, a
DataForSEO usage warning, a pipeline update waiting to be applied.
- The progress story - what stage the site is in and this week's movers.
- The publishing pace line (see
[Automations and modes](/docs/automations) for what it means).
- A stat row: search clicks, keywords tracked, guides published.
- The search traffic graph and a traffic-by-page breakdown.
- An Analytics teaser (Domain Rating, keyword rankings, clicks) that links
through to the full page.
- An AI visibility teaser.
- The trend radar - the newest subjects and ideas waiting on a call, with a
link to the rest on Trends.
- **Next actions** - PRs ready to merge (or already merging themselves),
pending suggestions waiting on your approve or reject, and the "Get it on
Google" indexing task for anything recently shipped.
- The backlink playbook's progress, and an activity log of what shipped
today and this week.
What you do there: approve or reject suggestions, merge a PR, fire a trend
scan, mark indexing requested, and work through the one-time setup cards.
**Initial setup** is a self-host concept: a stack of cards (connect
DataForSEO, connect Search Console, connect GitHub, fund the DataForSEO
account, set up alert email, install the pipeline, personalize the
backlink playbook) that disappear one by one as each step verifies itself.
On a cloud project the wizard does all of that in the background, so
instead you get a much smaller **Needs you** section with at most two
cards: reconnect the DispatchSEO GitHub App if it lost repo access, and
connect Google Search Console if you skipped it during setup. Everything
else is handled for you.
## Analytics
`/analytics` is the deep-numbers page - visit it for the weekly "how's it
actually going" review.
What it shows: Domain Rating, the search traffic chart with clicks,
impressions, average position and click-through rate (each with a
14-days-vs-the-14-before delta), traffic by page, a traffic-by-guide table,
a traffic-by-tool table, a keyword rankings table (top 20, with a link to
the full table), and top search queries. Nothing here is editable - it's
all read from Search Console and the nightly rank checks.
## Rankings
`/keywords` is the full keyword table behind the Analytics teaser: every
tracked keyword's current position, a 7-day and 30-day delta arrow, and a
30-day sparkline, next to its search volume and difficulty. A stat row
above it totals keywords tracked, how many sit in the top 10, the average
position, and how many moved up this week.
Read-only - keywords arrive from the weekly research run (or a manual
`/seo-research`). Open this page when you want to check whether one
specific keyword moved.
## AI visibility
`/ai` tracks whether AI assistants cite the site when they answer a
customer's question - the GEO half of SEO. It shows a stat tile per engine
(Google AI Overview, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini), a citation-rate
trend over time, a "Cited instead of you" list of the domains AI answers
named when they didn't name this site, and a full query log you can expand
for the verbatim answer text and who got cited.
Google's AI Overview half rides the nightly rank check at no extra cost.
The other four engines come from a separate scan that runs weekly, every
Wednesday, on the owner's own Claude subscription.
## Trends
`/trends` is the two-stage trend radar in full. **On the radar** lists the
subjects a scan caught - launches, Reddit and Hacker News buzz, Google
Trends - as evidence, nothing more. Pick one and hit **Get takes** and 3-5
validated guide angles land under it in **Ideas - your call**, where you
add each to the queue or skip it. **In the build queue** shows approved
trend ideas and which morning each one ships; **Building now** and
**Shipped** track what's already in motion, the latter with the search
traffic each trend guide has earned.
You do two things here: fire a scan (**Scan now**), and decide on what a
scan turns up. Hype decays by the day, so this is a page worth checking
often if you use it - nothing here builds without your approval.
## Queue
`/research` is the active build queue: the guide queue and the tool queue,
side by side, in build order - drag a row (or use the arrows on a narrow
screen) to reorder, and a pending row gets an inline approve button. A stat
row totals guides queued, tools queued, and how many have shipped so far.
An **Add your own idea** card lets you queue something the research run
didn't think of. A **History** section below keeps everything already
decided - shipped work and rejections, the latter with a **Restore**
button if you change your mind.
## Guides
`/pages` is the published ledger for guides only: every one shipped to the
site, newest first, with its Google/Bing index status and its clicks and
impressions over the last 28 days. A stat row totals guides published,
how many are indexed, and total clicks. Read-only - it fills in as the
daily builder ships pages.
## Tools
`/tools` is the same ledger for interactive tools, plus an **Add your own
idea** card (tool ideas can be queued directly from here, not only from
research). Same columns as Guides: index status, clicks, impressions.
## Backlinks
`/backlinks` is the backlink playbook: a curated list of the best free and
paid backlinks for this specific product, each with the exact copy to
paste, a link straight to the submission page, and (behind a disclosure)
step-by-step instructions plus a Claude for Chrome command that fills the
form for you. A progress meter tracks how many are done. Below that, a
**Do not buy** list names the traps that poison a backlink profile instead
of growing it, and a **Backlink prospects** table holds agent-researched
outreach targets from `/seo-backlinks`, where you track outreach status
per domain (a prospect stuck on "contacted" for 30+ days gets a stale-nudge
label).
## Automations
`/automations` is where you decide how hands-off the pipeline runs - see
[Automations and modes](/docs/automations) for the full breakdown of every
automation and what Semi, Auto, and Custom mean.
## Instructions
`/instructions` is a "show, don't tell" page. It renders two live wireframe
previews - a generated guide page and a generated tool page - painted in
the site's own actual theme colors, pulled from
`.dispatchseo/conventions.md`. A facts strip above them shows what your
own Claude Code found when it ran setup: theme tokens, voice rules, stack.
A **House rules** editor lets you tune the plain-English preferences every
build obeys (guide length, tone, and similar knobs) without touching code.
An **Also in the playbook** strip lists the smaller workflows - research,
backlinks, reporting, setup - with their steps and cadence.
If setup hasn't run yet for this project, the page shows a **Not adapted
to this site yet** card instead, with the command to run.
## Search Console
`/google` connects the traffic data source. On a cloud project this is
one-click OAuth: press connect, sign in with the Google account that owns
the property, and the page shows every property that account can see plus
a live 28-day sample query proving the connection actually works. Switch
which property is tracked right there if the wizard guessed wrong.
On self-host, OAuth is usually not configured (it needs
`GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID` / `GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET` env vars this page
will ask for if you want it), so the normal self-host path is instead the
service-account JSON described in
[Google Search Console](/docs/search-console) and the "Connect Google
Search Console" setup card on Home - both keep working regardless of
whether OAuth is ever set up.
## What's new
"What's new" opens the public changelog in a new tab rather than a page
inside the dashboard - it's the same list the `get_changelog` MCP tool
returns and the `/changelog` page anyone can read. A banner on the
dashboard itself announces an unseen release the first time you load a
page after it ships.
## Settings
Footer
`/settings` shows the account you're signed in to, then this project's
facts (name, domain, GitHub repo, Search Console property, DataForSEO
connection, publish mode, site-launched date - several of these are
editable inline), the keyword data source picker, a Claude Code token
rotation control (cloud projects with the GitHub App installed), the
project's MCP key with its ready-to-paste connect command, a cron key
(self-host only - the key your scheduled jobs use to call this backend),
and a danger zone for deleting the project or the whole account. The home
project can't be deleted. With no project yet, the page still shows your
account and a way to close it.
## Billing
Cloud only
`/billing` shows your current plan, the three tiers with their site and
keyword limits, a DataForSEO usage meter for bundled-plan customers (with
a note if usage has slowed or capped rank checks for the rest of the
period), and links out to the Polar-hosted checkout and billing portal for
invoices, payment method, and cancellation. Self-hosted deployments have no
billing at all - both `/billing` and `/plans` redirect straight to
`/dashboard` there.
## Log out
A plain link, not a page - it signs you out, clears the dashboard cookie,
and resets the local analytics identity so a shared computer's next sign-in
never gets linked to the previous session.
## Two old URLs that still work
`/new` redirects to `/dashboard?add=1`, which opens the add-site dialog on
whatever page you land on - it used to be its own form. `/playbook`
redirects to `/backlinks`, which absorbed it. Both exist only so old
bookmarks and links keep working.
## Everything here also works from chat
Every one of these pages has an MCP equivalent - reading a table, approving
a suggestion, toggling an automation, reordering the queue, all of it is
also a tool call the agent can make from Claude Code chat. That parity is
a hard rule in this codebase: a dashboard feature without a matching MCP
tool is considered unfinished. See [MCP tools](/docs/mcp-tools) for the
full list.