Skip to main content
This guide walks you through everything from account creation to your first real evaluation result. You’ll finish with a Visibility Score, an API Performance baseline, and live agent tracking on your docs — no credit card required to start.
1

Create your account

Go to app.lightsage.com and sign up with your email. No credit card is required. Your account starts with 250 free credits — enough to run your first evaluations across multiple platforms.
The free plan includes 3 prompts per day across 1 AI platform. Upgrade to Pro ($100/month) to unlock all 17 platforms and 1,500 credits per month.
2

Add your API

After signing in, add your API by providing either:
  • A documentation URL — Lightsage crawls your docs and detects endpoints, authentication patterns, and SDK information automatically
  • A GitHub repository URL — Lightsage reads your README, OpenAPI spec, and code examples
You can also add competitors at this step. Lightsage will track your share of voice against them across every prompt it runs.
3

Run your first evaluation

Once your API is added, run an evaluation from the dashboard. Lightsage sends implementation-style prompts to coding agents and answer engines — the kind of prompts developers actually use when building:
  • “Add [your API] to my Next.js app”
  • “Set up authentication with [your API]”
  • “Connect [your API] with [common integration]”
Each coding agent evaluation costs 5 credits and executes real tool calls against your endpoints. Answer engine evaluations cost 1 credit each.
Start with 2–3 implementation prompts that match your most common developer use cases. You can add more after reviewing your baseline results.
4

Read your Visibility Score and API Performance results

After your evaluation completes, you’ll see two sets of results:Visibility Score — A 0–100 score reflecting how often AI platforms recommend your API for relevant prompts, weighted by platform reach and prompt intent. You’ll also see your share of voice against each competitor you added.API Performance — Endpoint-level scores across coding agents. For each endpoint, Lightsage reports:
  • Eval score — Overall pass rate across all test runs
  • Discovery score — Whether agents find the correct endpoint
  • Tool call success rate — Whether generated code executes without errors
  • Error recovery rate — Whether agents can fix failures when they occur
  • Time to completion — How long agents take to finish a task using your endpoint
Look for endpoints with low tool call success rates — these are where agent-generated code is failing, which translates directly to developer frustration.
A high Visibility Score combined with a low API Performance score means agents are recommending you but the generated code doesn’t work. Fix usability issues before driving more visibility.
5

Install agent tracking middleware

Add one line of middleware to your Next.js app to detect which AI coding agents are visiting your docs and API endpoints in real time. This gives you live data on agent traffic without any performance impact.
middleware.ts
Install the package first:
Then add your LIGHTSAGE_API_KEY to your environment variables. You can find your key in the Lightsage dashboard under Settings → API Keys.The middleware detects Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor, Codex, and 6+ other coding agents visiting your site. Traffic appears in your dashboard under Agent Analytics within a few minutes.
The matcher pattern in the config excludes /api, /_next, and /admin routes by default. Adjust this to match your site structure.
6

Set up prompt tracking

Prompt tracking runs your defined prompts across AI platforms on a schedule — daily or every other day — so you can monitor visibility trends over time instead of taking one-off snapshots.To set up prompt tracking:
  1. Go to Prompt Tracking in your dashboard
  2. Click Add prompt and enter an implementation-style prompt
  3. Select which AI platforms to run it on (answer engines cost 1 credit/run, coding agents cost 5 credits/run)
  4. Set a run frequency — daily for fast-moving competitive situations, alternate days for steady-state monitoring
  5. Save and Lightsage will run the prompt automatically on your schedule
Your results accumulate over time, letting you see whether changes to your docs, llms.txt, or API responses are improving your visibility and usability scores.

​
Next steps

Understand your results

Learn what Visibility Score, Share of Voice, and API Performance metrics mean in detail.

Improve API Performance

Dig into endpoint-level scores and fix tool call failures.

Optimize for discovery

Add llms.txt, fix robots.txt, and improve error messages to boost agent recommendations.

Devtool Arena

See how your API ranks publicly against competitors on the free leaderboard.