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Getting started

Wrenda sits in front of your website and serves each visitor the version of a page that suits it best. This page explains what that means and walks the shortest path from sign-up to serving.

What Wrenda does

Wrenda is a reverse proxy that recognises AI crawlers, search engines and AI agents by their user agent and applies a rule you control: optimize (AI-enriched, structured HTML for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends), pre-render (a fully rendered page for Googlebot and Bingbot on JavaScript-heavy sites), pass-through or block. Human visitors always pass straight through to your origin untouched, so nothing about your site changes for people. Alongside the proxy, AI Citations tracks how often six AI models mention your brand, and the dashboard shows exactly what every crawler requested and what it was served.

The 15-minute path

Each step below links to the page that covers it in detail. The domain's Setup completeness card in the dashboard tracks the same steps and shows the next action.

Add your domain
In the dashboard go to Domains → Add domain, enter the domain and the origin URL where the site is hosted now. Wrenda probes the origin before letting you continue and shows whether it is reachable, which platform it detected (Vercel, Netlify, Shopify, WordPress…), whether the origin needs a different Host header, and warns if the origin points back at the domain itself (a loop).
Choose an install method
DNS proxy is right for most sites. If you can't change DNS, or you want to keep an existing CDN, use the CDN / web-server snippet. See Choose a method.
Point DNS (or your CDN) at Wrenda
For DNS proxy you add three records: a CNAME to proxy.wrenda.ai, a certificate-validation CNAME, and an ownership TXT record. If your domain is on Cloudflare, Quick Connect adds them for you. Full instructions per provider: DNS proxy.
Verify
Click Verify DNS Records. The checklist shows each record as found or not found, and the SSL certificate status. If a record is missing, wait a few minutes and try again.
Expected result
All three records show Found, the SSL certificate shows active, and the domain is marked Verified. You will also receive a “verified and serving” email.
Start in Shadow mode
New domains start in Shadow mode by default. Rules are evaluated and logged, but every request is passed through unchanged, so nothing a crawler sees is different yet. See Serving modes.
Review what bots would get
Open Rules → Bot Testing and request a page as GPTBot or Googlebot to see the optimized or pre-rendered output side by side with the original. In Shadow mode the request log records the action each rule would have taken, so you can confirm the rules match the crawlers you expect.
bash
```
curl -I -H "User-Agent: GPTBot/1.0" "https://your-domain.com/"
# Shadow mode: X-Wrenda-Mode: shadow, content unchanged
```
Go active
Switch the domain's mode to Active from the domain card. The change takes effect within seconds. Repeat the curl above and look for X-AI-Optimized: true.
Connect Search Console and GA4
Settings → Integrations. Search Console verifies Page Optimizations against real impressions and clicks; GA4 shows AI referral traffic. See Integrations.
Set your Brand Voice
Settings → Brand Voice. A short style guide the AI follows for every rewrite. See Optimizations.
Add a Citations brand
AI Citations → Add brand, then add the prompts you want to track. The first run is queued and results arrive as the queue drains. See AI Citations.

How a request flows

Once DNS points at Wrenda, every request for your domain reaches Wrenda's edge first. The user agent is matched against your crawler rules (highest priority first) and the action decides what happens:

text

Request
   ↓
Crawler rules (user-agent match, highest priority wins)
   ↓
┌──────────┬──────────────┬──────────────┬─────────────────┐
↓          ↓              ↓              ↓
BLOCK    OPTIMIZE      PRE-RENDER     PASS-THROUGH
 ↓          ↓              ↓              ↓
403      AI transform   Browser render   Your origin
         (cached 1 h)   (cached 24 h)    (CDN cache rules)

Static assets (images, CSS, JS, fonts…) always skip optimize and pre-render and go to pass-through with your CDN cache rules, whoever requests them.

Where next

Choose a methodDNS proxy, CDN / web-server snippet, or reverse proxy — and how to pick.Serving modesActive, Shadow and Paused — what each does and when to use it.Bot handlingActions, bot categories, recommended rules, priority and testing.Troubleshooting522s, stuck certificates, origin loops, Host-header 404s and more.