Documentation

What the app is

Smithworks Intelligence writes a monthly marketing report for one website. It reads Google Analytics 4 for visits, Google Search Console for search clicks, and a homepage speed test run in a lab. The app is in beta.

Every number on a report comes from stored data. The written parts of a report, such as the headline, the three findings, and the plan, are written once by an AI model from those stored figures. A person at Smithworks or on your team can edit that text.

Roles

An account is one person and their login. A person reaches a site in one of four ways: they own it, a group they are in holds it, the owner invited them to view it, or they are Smithworks staff. A person can be in several groups, and a site can be in several groups. When more than one way applies, the highest access wins.

Only the owner shares a site, offers its ownership, or removes it. A site with no group shows No Group Assignment.

This page shows the sections your role can use. Sign in to see more of it.

Sharing a site

The owner of a site opens Sharing on Settings and invites a person to view that site. The invitation lasts 24 hours. Decline, cancel, and expiry close it. Remove takes a closed invitation off the list. Only a new invitation from the owner opens it again. A pending invitation shows its link, and Copy link copies it.

The invited person reads the reports. They do not see the site settings or the Google connection, and they cannot run a report. Accepting does not add them to a group. Accepting opens their dashboard, which shows that site and lists every month's report.

A person who views a shared site has a Settings tab. It lists everyone who has accepted a view of the site, each marked Owner or Member. Pending invitations are not listed there. The only change they can make is Leave this site on their own row. Leaving ends their view, and the owner sees a notice on the dashboard. The Sharing list shows them as Left, and only a new invitation gives them access again.

The invitation email comes from Smithworks Intelligence. If the person has no login, that email contains the link. They create an account on the invitation, and no site address is asked for. The next screen asks them to confirm the email from Smithworks Intelligence. The confirmation link opens a page with a button. Pressing the button confirms the address and returns them to the invitation. Opening the link does not use it up. Creating the account, and confirming the email, does not accept the invitation. If that email already has a login, the invitation asks them to sign in and also offers account creation. Creating an account with an email that already has a login asks them to sign in instead. Neither signing in nor creating the account accepts the invitation.

The owner can offer ownership to someone who already has access. The current owner stays the owner until that person accepts. When they accept, the site and all its reports move to them. A person with no account gets one. They are the only owner, and they can change the site settings, run reports, and manage Sharing. The previous owner becomes a viewer: they can still read the reports, the new owner can cancel that view, and they can leave. Other viewers keep their access.

The Google connection keeps running after the move, on the previous owner's Google login. Settings asks the new owner to reconnect with their own Google login. Smithworks staff can still open every site.

The site stays in its groups, and the offer and the acceptance screen both name them. The new owner can remove the site from a group on Settings. Only Smithworks staff add a site to a group.

Signing up and signing in

• Sign up with an email address and a password. A confirmation email arrives from Smithworks Intelligence <intelligence@smithworks.marketing>. The link in it finishes the sign-up.
• A new sign-up adds one site. A login that already owns a site cannot add another; more sites come from an ownership transfer or from Smithworks staff.
• An invitation to view someone else's site opens account creation with that email filled in and no site address. Creating the account does not accept the invitation.
• Forgot password sends a reset link. The reset page will not accept your current password; choose a different one.
• Sign out is at the right of the bar under the header.

The tabs

Dashboard

• When a login reaches more than one site, the Site list at the top chooses which one the dashboard and Settings show. It groups your sites, sites you can edit, and sites you can view.
• The top shows the site name, its homepage address, and a picture of the homepage. Select the picture to see the full page.
• Google Analytics and Search Console each show two states: Connected or Not connected (Google access), and Configured or Not configured (the property or site is chosen). Only Connected and Configured together let reports run.
• Until the first month is stored, the dashboard and Settings both show Get the first report with three steps: connect Google, choose the Google Analytics property, and choose the Search Console site. Saving the last of these loads the months on its own, so there is no step for it. The next step has its own button. On Settings that button scrolls to the row. On the dashboard it opens Settings at that row.
• The picture beside the site name is the homepage as loaded by the latest desktop speed test. Selecting it opens the whole page, top to bottom, and you can scroll it. Until the first test finishes, a plain outline shows instead.
• This month shows the latest complete month. Since shows the change from the month before the site was added.
• Sessions come from Google Analytics. Search clicks come from Search Console. Each is compared with the month named beside it.
• Goal, Work in motion, and Next show the notes entered for that month. Goal appears only on Smithworks sprint client sites.
• Reports lists the latest month. Previous Months lists earlier months back to the month before the site was added.
• Each month's link reads Run the report when its data is stored, its homepage speed test is finished, and nothing is written yet. Before that it reads Test homepage speed, Testing homepage speed…, or Speed test did not finish. It reads Writing… while the report is being written, and Open after.

Reports start with the month before the Site added date, so a new site has a report as soon as Google's months load, without waiting for the next month to end.

Reading a report

A report covers one calendar month and compares it with the month before. The links at the top of the report move between stored months.

• Section navigation: Overview, Findings, Next steps, Evidence, and Questions stay under the header while the report scrolls. The section in view is marked. From Smithworks is in that bar only when the report includes it. On a narrow screen the bar stays one row and scrolls sideways on its own.
• The blue band: a headline, one sentence under it, and four figures. Sessions, the share of added sessions that came from Direct when that comparison is valid, Google search clicks for the entire site, and the homepage phone lab check. Direct means sessions with no clear referral source recorded by Analytics. The phone figure is the time until the largest content appears. It is a lab result, dated on its own, and it is not visitor performance for the report month. A repeated phone measurement is marked Provisional — repeated measurement.
• The three things that matter most: three findings, most important first. Each names its source and has a chart drawn from the stored numbers.
• View reasoning: each finding has a View reasoning button. It opens that finding's heading, the observation already on the card, why it might matter, and what is still unknown. See Step N closes it and moves to that finding's step. The step stays in Do next, and the charts stay under Evidence.
• Do next: the plan, one step per finding plus a fourth step.
• The charts behind each finding: the charts the three findings chose, in finding order, each shown once. A finding can use up to two charts, or none when no chart shows its fact. The other charts the report can draw are hidden under More charts each time a report opens, in the order the writer judged most useful; the button then reads Hide charts. A month the report has not written yet uses the session, homepage clicks, and homepage speed charts.
• Pinning a chart: a signed-in reader can press Pin on any chart. Pinned charts come first on that site's reports every month, newest pin first, and only that person sees them. Read-only members can pin. Unpin puts the chart back where it was, or back under the hidden More charts. A chart that changes place, or the More charts button it went under, pulses for about two seconds. Undo puts back the order from before the last press. A pinned chart that a month cannot draw is listed under the charts and kept for later months.
• Top Movers charts: each row shows the page or query, its clicks in both periods, and the change between them as a signed number with dots. Red dots on the left are a loss and blue dots on the right a gain: one dot is under 10, two are 10 to 99, and three are 100 or more. No change has no dots.
• AI search charts: three charts look at how the site can be found by AI search tools. Search crawler access shows what the site's robots.txt and homepage told Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot on the day the app checked, as Allowed, Blocked, or Unknown. The app checks each site once a month, starting in the month the check began, and never fills in earlier months. Question-style Google searches counts the visible Search Console queries that start with a question word or end with a question mark. AI Assistant sessions lists the sessions GA4 put in its AI Assistant channel each stored month. None of the three shows that an AI tool cited the site, and a block can be the site's choice.
• Meeting questions: questions to bring to the next conversation.
• Explore More: a reading link under a section, chosen from Smithworks articles. A written report uses each article once, in the section it helps most.
• From Smithworks: on paid and sprint client reports, the month's changes, completed work, and next steps entered by the team. The goal shows only on sprint client reports.
• Monthly marketing lens: every report shows the same guide, Be found, Be trusted, Be chosen. How to read this opens a fixed explanation. It is not a score. Free and paid reports include a link to an Executive Growth Brief, which opens in a new tab. A Smithworks sprint client report leaves that link out. On a sprint client report, someone who can edit the site also gets a link to set or edit the goal.

A missing day is not counted as zero. When Google Analytics' monthly total and the sum of stored days disagree, both are shown and neither is chosen.

Homepage speed is the average of several phone and desktop lab runs. It is a lab test, not a measurement of real visitors.

Sending feedback

• A speech mark sits on each written part of a report. It is faint until you point at its box.
• Select it to open the feedback panel at the bottom of the screen with that part named. Write a note and send it.
• Help me do better sends a note about the whole report. On a phone it sits after the questions. On a wider screen it stays at the bottom left.
• Smithworks reads every note. A note does not change the report by itself.
• Every other signed-in page has Help me do better in the same place, except the Feedback pages. There it opens a general feedback form: no speech marks, no Whole report, just the box. The note keeps the page it came from, and the site when the page belongs to one.

Settings

Settings shows the site selected on the dashboard: site name, Google Analytics property, Search Console site, homepage address, and the Site added date.

• Change opens a setting for editing. A setting with no Change link has been locked by an administrator.
• Google Analytics and Search Console each show Connected or Not connected, and Configured or Not configured. Choose appears until the property or site is picked.
• Google Analytics and Search Console need a Google connection. Connect or Reconnect starts it; then choose the property and the site.
• A homepage can be typed as domain.com or https://domain.com. It is stored as https://domain.com/.
• Adding a site asks for the site address and, optionally, a site name. A blank name uses the address, such as smithworks.marketing. Either can be changed later in Settings.
• Groups lists the groups that hold the site, or No Group Assignment. The owner and Smithworks staff can remove the site from a group; only staff add it to one.
• Site added is the date reports count from for this site. It is set when the site is added, and only an administrator can change it, for example to start reports earlier.
• Remove site, at the bottom, opens a confirmation with two choices. Remove the site and keep its data hides the site and keeps its stored months, written reports, edits, feedback notes, and lab runs; adding the same address again brings it back, with Google connected and its sources chosen again. Remove the site and delete all its data deletes everything and cannot be undone. Either choice removes the site's Google connection. The owner can remove their site and administrators can remove any site. No one else sees it.

Account

• Name, company, phone, and email. Save account stores them. Phone is optional. A number is stored as (208) 555-0100, and any other phone is refused. The email is the verified login. A different address is not used until that address is confirmed from the email that is sent.
• Photo: the pencil on the portrait chooses an image, and it is stored at once. Remove image clears it.
• Change password needs at least 8 characters, entered twice.
• Two-factor sign-in is not available yet.
• Cancel account is not active yet. Nothing is deleted from that button.

Shared report links

An administrator can share a site's reports with anyone who has the link. That link opens the report without a login. It is read-only: no editing, no starting a report, and no feedback. Search engines are asked not to list it. Settings and every other page still need a login.

Privacy

Signed-in pages load HubSpot tracking so Smithworks can see product use and follow up on feedback. Sign-in, sign-up, and password pages do not load it. The Smithworks privacy policy is linked in the footer.