What You Need to Start
An account (free trial, no credit card required), and a piece of copy to score. That is it. You do not need an audience profile configured before your first analysis — COS Chat runs without one and you can add a persona at any point.
Most users run their first scored analysis within 10 minutes of creating an account.
Step 1: Open COS Chat
When you sign up and log in, you land directly in COS Chat. This is the main analysis interface. The input placeholder reads: "Paste content, a URL, or describe what you need..." — that is the starting point for every analysis.
No setup required. No onboarding wizard. Paste your copy and go.
What if you want to organize your work by account or campaign?
Create a project. From the left nav, click Projects, then New Project. Give it a name (client name, campaign, product line). Once created, you can open Chat within that project context, which scopes the conversation and analysis history to that client or campaign.
Step 2: Paste Your Copy and Analyze
Paste your existing copy — a sales email, landing page section, cold outreach opening, or ad — into the Chat input and press Send. COS runs a multi-framework analysis covering four dimensions:
- Engagement Analysis — emotional triggers: impact, novelty, and relevance
- Personality Analysis — fit to the Big Five (OCEAN) profile of your target audience
- Strategic Clarity — coherence between the copy's message and a business goal
- Framing Strategy — cognitive frame and positioning relative to the reader
Results appear in the chat. Each framework returns a score and a set of specific findings — not generic feedback, but identified gaps and the structural reason they exist.
For first-time users, scoring existing copy is the best starting point. It gives you a baseline: here is how your current copy scores across all four frameworks before any optimization. That baseline makes the rewrite suggestions concrete.
Run your first analysis free. No credit card required.
Start Free TrialStep 3: Add a Persona for Calibrated Scores
The Personality Analysis framework scores copy against a specific audience profile. Without a persona, COS uses a neutral baseline. With one, every score is weighted against that audience's inferred OCEAN profile.
To add a persona: open a project, navigate to the Personas section (accessible from the project workspace), and describe your target audience. COS accepts several formats:
- Job title + context — "VP of Sales, mid-market B2B SaaS, focused on pipeline metrics"
- Jobs-to-be-done — what this persona is trying to accomplish
- ICP attributes — company size, industry, role, pain points
- Technical audience — for developer or engineering-focused messaging
- Freeform description — any description COS can map to a profile
COS infers OCEAN scores from the description and uses them as the scoring baseline. You are not locked in — personas are editable, and most users refine them after the first few analyses.
Multiple audience segments
Create a separate persona for each segment. The same copy scored against an enterprise procurement persona and an SMB marketing persona will return different Personality Analysis scores. A message that fits a high-Conscientiousness CFO profile may score poorly for a high-Openness product manager. Same copy, different fit. That gap is the information.
Personality Analysis: how to read the scores
The Personality Analysis framework returns a 0 to 100 coverage score for each of the five OCEAN dimensions, weighted by your persona. Here is how to read them.
| Dimension | What It Measures | High Score Means | Low Score Means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Openness | Novelty, conceptual thinking, ideas | Copy introduces a new angle or framing | Copy is conventional and evidence-only |
| Conscientiousness | Specificity, process, proof | Copy delivers detail, evidence, and structure | Copy leads with benefits and vision, not proof |
| Extraversion | Energy, social proof, boldness | Copy is confident, action-oriented, visible | Copy is neutral or understated |
| Agreeableness | Team outcomes, peer validation, trust | Copy acknowledges others and builds consensus | Copy is individual-focused with no social proof |
| Neuroticism | Risk reduction, reassurance, stability | Copy addresses fear, risk, and uncertainty | Copy ignores risk and worst-case scenarios |
The target score for each dimension depends on your audience profile. Copy to a high-Conscientiousness audience (CFOs, procurement leads, compliance officers) needs a Conscientiousness score above 70. Copy to a high-Openness audience (product managers, innovation leads, early adopters) needs an Openness score above 65. COS flags any dimension below the threshold for your defined audience.
Step 4: Apply the Rewrite Suggestions
For every framework dimension below the threshold for your persona, COS provides a specific rewrite suggestion. Not "make this more persuasive." Something concrete: add a peer adoption data point (Agreeableness gap), open with a risk-reduction proof rather than a feature list (Neuroticism gap), replace the vision statement with a process description (Conscientiousness gap).
Apply one suggestion at a time and rescore. You will see which changes move the needle and which do not. Over 5 to 10 analyses, most users develop a clear picture of which structural patterns consistently score well for their audience type.
How long does a typical revision take?
For a 150-word cold email: under 15 minutes for the first revision cycle (analysis, review suggestions, apply one or two changes, rescore). For a 500-word landing page section: 30 to 45 minutes for a full revision cycle. Most gaps are addressed with 1 to 3 specific changes, not a full rewrite.
The Monitor and SEO Planner
COS Chat handles copy analysis. Two other tools in the left nav are worth knowing about:
- Monitor — automated site health scoring. COS crawls your site weekly, flags messaging and SEO issues, and tracks trends over time. Connect Google Search Console in the Monitor for keyword position data and striking-distance opportunities.
- SEO Planner — page-level SEO analysis: keyword graph, cannibalization detection, page metadata proposals. Runs on the crawled page corpus.
Both are available on paid plans. Monitor requires a project with a verified domain.
Support and Training
What onboarding looks like
There is no required onboarding sequence. The workflow is: paste copy into Chat, read scores, apply suggestions. Add a persona when you want audience-calibrated scores. The FAQ at /faq/ covers the common questions that come up in the first few days.
If you want a walkthrough of COS against your specific use case, email us. We run those conversations at no charge. The goal is for you to understand what the scores mean for your specific content type before you commit to a paid plan.
Email support
Email response within 24 hours on business days. For questions about persona setup, score interpretation, or rewrite application, we walk through it directly. Team and Agency accounts get priority support. We do not route you to a knowledge base and call it support.
What the paid plans include
The Solo plan ($49/month) includes unlimited COS Chat analyses, up to 25 monitored pages, cannibalization detection, and striking-distance opportunities. The Team plan ($199/month) covers up to 75 pages, multiple team members, and multiple projects. The Agency plan ($499/month) covers up to 200 pages for agencies running multiple client sites. All paid plans start with a free trial, no credit card required.
Common Questions
Do I need to know what OCEAN scores mean before I start?
No. COS explains each dimension in context within the analysis results. You do not need to study personality psychology before your first run. The scores and suggestions are actionable without a background in the Big Five model.
Can I score copy that someone else wrote?
Yes. Paste any copy into the Chat input: drafts from your team, output from other AI tools, existing campaigns you want to audit. COS scores the text against your active persona regardless of where the copy originated.
What if the scores disagree with my instinct about the copy?
Trust the specifics. If the Conscientiousness score is 18 on copy targeting a procurement audience, the copy is almost certainly missing concrete evidence, process detail, or proof points. Check whether your instinct is about style preference (subjective) or psychological calibration (measurable). The score measures fit to the audience's documented psychology, not whether the copy reads well by a general standard.
Where do the 860+ peer-reviewed studies come from?
The COS scoring framework is grounded in published research across seven psychology disciplines: Big Five personality theory, persuasion science, cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, communication psychology, and consumer behavior. The Science page at /science/ covers the research base and specific citations.
Ready to score your first piece of copy?