01Managing the landscape begins with knowing its scale.
Managing AI and controlling misinformation begins with understanding the detail of what the organisation controls. Landscape Discovery combines the knowledge held across the organisation with the additional properties the system can find, establishing the scale of the online landscape before later assessment or management begins.
The immediate objective is scale, rather than assessing one website in isolation. Leaders first need a credible account of what is actually there.
That account provides the initial baseline for understanding what is delivering and where capabilities or compliance may be lacking. It replaces an assumed property list with a discovered organisational landscape.
02One secure link, distributed through one email.
AAAnow provides a secure link containing the required instructions. One email can distribute it across the organisation and to partners and agencies, allowing those who know about online properties to add them directly. The process creates a shared starting point across the organisation.
Each participant can add known properties in 2 minutes. Their contributions create the initial map from which the system begins its own discovery.
One shared starting point for the wider online landscape. The form each participant sees, as on Add the sites you know.
The starting map benefits from knowledge that sits beyond one central team. Properties held by different departments, partners or agencies enter the same organisational view before the engine extends it.
03The system maps outward from what people know.
Using the contributed properties, AAAnow maps subdomains, linked sites and brand-associated domains. The mapping also includes IP and trade mark review of the organisation’s online position, extending discovery beyond the locations already supplied through the secure link.
The engine continues profiling what has been found after the initial map is produced. As content and connected properties change, discovery continues examining the resulting landscape.
04Establish scale before counting individual websites.
Landscape Discovery begins across the organisation, not as a series of separate website purchases. During initial discovery, the organisation is not paying for each website added by participants or identified by the engine; the service remains focused on establishing the scale of what exists.
Once that landscape is visible, the initial baseline starts to show what is delivering. It also identifies where capabilities or compliance may be lacking.
Discovery
Establishes what exists.
Benchmarking
Addresses where the wider landscape stands and how that position changes over time. This baseline does not become the separate Digital Landscape Benchmarking service.
05What discovery finds can change the landscape.
AAAnow uses Digital Debt to describe historic, superseded, forgotten or unmanaged content that remains within the wider online environment. Discovery makes that material part of the organisational picture again.
Often, around one-third of what discovery finds is subsequently removed because it lacks fundamentals or its content is no longer relevant. Historic, superseded and forgotten properties can remain online after their purpose has passed, so discovery may change the landscape rather than merely document it.
Removal is not assumed for all discovered material. Making it visible provides the organisation with the detail it needs to decide what should remain online.
Understanding what remains is also the first part of managing AI and controlling misinformation. Landscape Discovery establishes the organisational scope before the separate AI Readiness and AI Misinformation Exposure capabilities examine their own defined questions.
06Landscape Discovery within CCDM.
Continuous Content Discovery and Mapping, or CCDM, is the overall AAAnow Platform. Landscape Discovery is the corporate capability within CCDM that gathers known properties, maps outward from them and continually profiles the resulting online landscape.
The discovered landscape provides a clearer starting scope for later capability, compliance, readiness, misinformation or benchmarking work. Each of those activities retains its own defined purpose.
07Commonly asked questions.
What will Landscape Discovery actually tell us?
How big your online landscape really is, and what is in it. You start us off with the properties you already know about, and we map outwards from there: subdomains, linked sites, brand-associated domains and other places we find.
How do we set it up across the organisation?
We send you one secure link with short instructions. You pass it on in a single email, internally and to your partners and agencies. That is the whole setup.
How long does it take each person?
About 2 minutes to add the properties they know about. All the contributions land on the same starting map, so the more people who add what they hold, the further we can take the discovery.
Who should we send the link to?
Anyone who knows where your online properties are: colleagues in other teams, partners, agencies. It does not need to be kept to a central team.
Are we charged for each website?
No. Initial discovery is not charged site by site. It runs as a corporate service, and the first job is establishing the scale, whether a property comes in through the link or we find it ourselves.
What do you look for once we have added what we know?
Your properties are the starting points. From there we map subdomains, linked sites and brand-associated domains, with IP and trade mark review behind it.
What happens once we have the first map?
We keep going. Content changes and connected properties come and go, so we carry on looking, and your view of the landscape grows well past what was contributed at the start.
What will we learn from the first baseline?
Where things are working across the landscape we have found, and where they are not: the places capability or compliance is missing.
Why does around a third of what you find usually get removed?
Because a good deal of it has no business being there: nothing behind it, or content nobody needs any more. Around a third of what discovery turns up tends to go once it has been looked at. It was usually still online because nobody knew it was there.
Where does this fit with AI and misinformation?
You cannot manage what AI says about you until you know what you control. Landscape Discovery settles that first, so AI Readiness and AI Misinformation Exposure start from the landscape you actually have rather than the one you assumed.
Control begins with knowing what is actually there
Landscape Discovery provides the organisation with a credible map before it asks what to keep, improve or assess.
The first act of control is knowing what is actually there.