🧱 Building And Editing Surveys By Hand

Every survey is built from the same rows, whether AI drafted them or you typed them. This guide covers the builder itself: its five steps, every field on the first two, and the safety rules that run when you save.

Where to find it:

Click New Survey for a new one, or Edit on any row of the Surveys tab. The builder opens on its first step.

The five steps:

The step bar along the top shows the builder's five steps: Create, Questions, Opt-ins & Routing, Thank-you & Look, and Publish & Share. Click any step, or use Next and Back in the bar at the bottom.

Every move between steps saves the survey for you, and a small Saved message with the time confirms it. A half built survey is never lost. The bar at the bottom also has Save survey, which saves at any point, and Preview, which shows exactly what visitors will see, unsaved changes included.

The page maker, the embed snippet and the report buttons on Publish & Share appear once the survey has been saved once.

Survey details:

• Title is for you. It appears in your lists and reports, and it becomes the browser tab title of the survey's own page when you create one. Visitors see the Public heading instead, which you set on Thank-you & Look.
• Status is Draft (not visible), Active (collecting responses) or Closed (stopped). Only Active surveys are shown to visitors.
• Goal is what you want to learn. Fill it in even when you build by hand, because the AI reading of your results uses it to judge what matters.
• Once the survey is saved, its shortcode shows here too.

Add and edit questions:

1. Go to the Questions step.
2. Click Add question. A new multiple choice row appears with two empty options.
3. Pick the type from the dropdown on the left of the row.
4. Type the question in Question text.
5. For multiple choice and checkbox questions, fill in the options. Click + Add option for more, and the small x beside an option to remove it.
6. Tick Required if nobody should be able to move on without answering.
7. Use the up and down arrows on the right to move the question.
8. To remove a question, click Delete on its row and confirm.

Each row also has extra boxes for some types: "Other" write-in on multiple choice and checkbox questions, Show as a dropdown on multiple choice questions, and Only show this question if on every question after the first. See The Seven Question Types and Different Questions For Different People, And Saving Answers As They Go.

Required answers:

A required question shows a star after its wording, in your accent color, and a polite message, "Please answer this question to continue", if they try to move on without answering. Use it sparingly: every required question is a place where someone can give up. A good rule is to require only the questions the whole survey depends on.

Rules applied when you save:

• A question with no text is dropped.
• A multiple choice or checkbox question needs at least two options, or it is dropped too.
• Empty options are removed.
• If a save would somehow arrive with no questions at all for a survey that already has questions, it is treated as a bad submit and your existing questions are kept.
• A survey needs at least one question before it can be set to Active from the Surveys list.
• Each question keeps a stable id (q1, q2 and so on), so answers stay attached to the right question even after you reorder.

The thank-you step:

On Thank-you & Look, the Thank-you step card sets what people see after they send their answers:

• Heading, for example "Thank you!".
• Message, a line or two under it.
• Redirect URL, optional. When it is set, people are sent to that address about a second after they finish, instead of staying on the thank-you message. Routing rules can send people to different pages by their answers, and this address is the fallback. See Sending Survey Opt-Ins To ResultsAiX Mailer.

Duplicating and deleting:

On the Surveys tab, Clone copies a survey's questions and settings into a new Draft with (copy) after its title. It is the fastest way to run a second version. Delete removes the survey and every one of its responses. The confirmation names the survey and how many responses go with it, so export them first if you want to keep them.

A real example:

For its autumn feedback survey, Yoursite Academy builds six questions by hand: a 0 to 10 recommend score (required), a star rating for the latest course (required), a multiple choice for which course they took with "Other" write-in, a checkbox question about what would help most, a yes or no about putting the course into practice, and one long answer last. The thank-you message says every answer is read by a real person.

Tips:

• Put the easiest question first and the open text question last.
• Preview after every few changes. It costs nothing and records nothing.
• Next, choose the right type for each question. See The Seven Question Types.