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What this does

Every setup guide in this section ends the same way: you wire up a log drain, an edge function or a REST call, and then wait to see whether events arrive. Doing that against production means your first attempt is also your first live change. A staging site lets you do it somewhere safe. You register a non-production hostname — staging.example.com, preprod.example.com — point an integration at it, and confirm events land. The traffic is reported separately, and none of it reaches your production numbers.
Staging sites are for a stable hostname you control, not for per-deploy preview URLs. More on that in Limits below.

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Prerequisites

A Searchable project with LLM Analytics set up for your production domain
A stable staging hostname that is already serving traffic
Permission to configure the integration on that host (the same access the platform guide for your host asks for)
Staging sites are still rolling out. If the Staging site card isn’t on your Setup tab yet, your account doesn’t have it — nothing else in this section depends on it, so every platform guide works as written against your production site in the meantime.

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Setup

1

Add the staging site

In your Searchable dashboard, go to LLM Analytics → Setup and find the Staging site card.Click Add staging site, then fill in:Adding a staging site turns Development mode on for you automatically, which is what makes it visible in the site pickers.
2

Select the staging site

Still on the Setup tab, use the Site selector to switch to the staging site. Staging sites are grouped together at the top of that list, each marked Staging.A note appears confirming you’re configuring a staging environment. That note is your signal that everything you do next belongs to staging rather than production.
3

Follow your platform's guide as normal

With the staging site selected, pick your crawler source and follow the guide for your host exactly as you would for production — see the setup overview to choose one.The important part is that the integration token you generate while a staging site is selected belongs to that site. There is nothing extra to configure: point the drain, function or REST call at the token you just copied, and its events are attributed to staging.
Generate the token after switching sites. A token minted while production was selected sends its events to production, however staging-looking the hostname is — tokens are what decide attribution here, not the hostname in the request.
4

Send some traffic

Hit the staging host and watch the events arrive under the staging scope (next section). You do not need to wait for a real AI crawler: any request the integration forwards is enough to prove the wiring, because what you are testing is the path from your host to Searchable.

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Seeing staging data

Staging numbers are never mixed into the dashboard you normally look at. To see them:
  1. Open any LLM Analytics tab
  2. Open the Sites filter and turn on Development mode
  3. Pick the staging site from the Staging section at the top
While a staging site is selected, an amber banner sits above the tabs for the whole visit, saying the numbers below it are staging data. Every figure on the page — crawls, pages, referred visitors — is then scoped to staging only.
Development mode is yours alone. It is stored in your own browser, per project, so turning it on does not change what a colleague sees. Someone else on the project has to turn it on themselves before staging appears in their pickers. Nothing about the data is hidden from them — only the picker entry.

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What stays separate

Three guarantees are worth being explicit about, because they are what make a staging site safe to leave in place rather than something to tear down afterwards:
  • Production totals never move. Staging traffic is excluded from every production figure on the project. Selecting the staging scope is the only way to see it.
  • A staging site is yours, not shared. It belongs to exactly one project and carries its own token. Two different projects can each register the same staging hostname and neither can see the other’s data.
  • There is no ownership check to pass. A production domain has to prove ownership before it will report, because the same production hostname can be tracked by more than one project. A staging site already belongs to exactly one project, so there is nothing to adjudicate: no DNS record, no waiting. That is what makes this work on hosts whose DNS you do not control.

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Limits

A hostname that changes every build — acme-git-feat-x.vercel.app and friends — cannot be registered usefully, because the host you register has to be the host that appears in requests. Point a stable alias at your preview environment and register that instead.
The hostname is the staging site’s identity, so it is fixed once added. The optional site name is just a label and can be edited freely. Choose the hostname deliberately.
Staging and production are separate records with separate history, so there is no switch that turns one into the other. When you’re ready for production, follow your platform’s guide again with the production site selected. The staging history stays where it is.
There is no built-in parity view that diffs staging against production. Both scopes show the same metrics, so you can compare them side by side yourself by switching the site filter.

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Verifying it worked

Select the staging site in the dashboard, as above. Events arriving under the staging scope — with your production totals unchanged — is the confirmation that the integration is wired correctly.

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Troubleshooting

The token was generated while the production site was selected, so that is where its events go.Switch the Site selector to the staging site, generate a new token there, and update your integration to use it. Then revoke the old one so the earlier wiring can’t keep reporting.
Development mode is off. It’s per person and per browser, so this is expected on a second machine, in a private window, or for a colleague who has never turned it on.Turn it on from the Site selector on the Setup tab, or from the Sites filter on any dashboard tab.
The hostname can’t be edited after the fact. Add a second staging site with the correct hostname and point your integration’s token at that one — a project can hold more than one.The unused site simply stops receiving events once nothing is pointed at it. Revoke its token so nothing can report to it by accident.
Revoke the staging site’s integration token. That stops ingestion immediately, whatever is still configured on the host side — deliveries from the old wiring start failing authentication.Turning Development mode off only hides the site from your pickers; it does not stop collection.

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Next steps

Pick your platform

Choose the crawler source for your host and follow its guide against the staging site.

REST API

Send events yourself from any platform that can make an HTTP request.