Free report vs. dashboard: why the numbers are different

Understand why your free report score and your real dashboard score often look very different.

2 minute read · Last reviewed: August 14, 2026

You ran the free report, then signed up and looked at your real dashboard, and the score is different, sometimes a lot different. That's expected, and here's why.

The free report is an estimate

The free report is built to be fast: it comes back in a couple of minutes, with no card and no account required. To move that quickly, it only checks two models (ChatGPT and Gemini) instead of all five, skips sentiment analysis entirely, and uses a lighter, faster process for finding brand mentions.

You go from a website URL to a ready report in about two minutes: Peekaboo generates the buyer questions to ask and the competitors to measure you against, then runs them across the AI models.

Because of that, the score you see on your free report is an AI estimate, deliberately conservative, and it's explicitly labeled "Pending real analysis" so you know it isn't the final word. Most brands land somewhere between 0 and 20 on the free report; scores above 51 are rare at this stage. That's by design: it's meant to be a starting signal, not a verdict.

The paid dashboard replaces it with measured data

Once you create an account and your first real analysis runs, you're looking at actual measured results: real answers pulled from all five AI models, live web search, full sentiment analysis, and citation tracking. That number is the authoritative one, and it replaces the free report's estimate.

Once your paid dashboard is live, the estimate is gone: this score is averaged from real runs across all five models, with the run count shown right next to it.

So if your free report showed a 12 and your dashboard shows a 38 a day later, nothing is broken. You're comparing a quick estimate against real, measured data on a fuller data set. Expect a jump, in either direction, the first time real data replaces the estimate.

When the free report picks the wrong company

To fix it:

Go to your brand settings and add alternate name variations to help the system correctly disambiguate your brand (for example, if your brand name overlaps with another company, add your full legal name or a more specific variant).
Double check your industry, website URL, and product description are accurate and specific in your brand settings, since these help the matching process too.
If it's still pulling the wrong company after that, contact team@aipeekaboo.com and we'll look into it directly.