In Crawl Cove, everything lives inside a client. A client is a site — or a set of domains — that you manage, and it's the workspace that holds that site's audits, findings, rankings, tasks, and reports. Before you can crawl anything, you add the client. The good news: it's a five-minute form, not a setup chore.
Note
What you'll need: Crawl Cove installed and open. A Google account with this client's site in Search Console is useful for step 3, but you can skip it and connect later. ~5 minutes.
Open the wizard
From the Clients page in the agency-level rail, click Add Client. The onboarding wizard walks you through four steps.
The four steps
1. Name & domain(s). Enter the client name and one or more domains. A single client can hold more than one website — a main site plus a microsite or a separate language domain — so add them all here if they belong together.
2. Brand assets. Upload the client's logo and pick their brand colours. The logo bytes go to the app's main process, which is the only part of Crawl Cove that touches the filesystem — consistent with the local-first, nothing-phones-home design.
3. Connect Google Search Console. Pick the Google account and the Search Console property for this client. This is what unlocks impact scoring, search performance, and per-URL query data later. You can skip it here and connect from the client's Connections page whenever you're ready. See Connecting Search Console for the full setup.
4. Queue first crawl. Kick off the initial audit immediately, or skip it and start it later from the Audits page. Either way, the client is ready to work.
Tip
Capture the brand once, reuse it everywhere. The logo and colours you set in step 2 flow automatically into every white-label PDF report for this client — you never re-upload a logo per report. That single step is what makes report assembly drop from hours to minutes. See White-label reports.
Clients are archived, never deleted
When a client relationship ends, you archive the client — it disappears from your active and global lists, along with its tasks, but nothing is destroyed. Audit history, findings, and rankings are all preserved. This is deliberate: a versioned, prove-the-fix workflow only works if the history survives, and a client who comes back next year picks up exactly where they left off.
Next steps
- Running your first audit — kick off the crawl and watch it work.
- Connecting Search Console — the one integration that unlocks impact-ranked findings.