This lesson gets your audit stack running in a few minutes and removes the two things that most often stop people at the start: a confusing setup error and an unknown bill. It walks through the Google Cloud setup step by step, explains the costs with real arithmetic, and shows exactly where your key goes when you use the course tools.
What this lesson covers
- Creating a Google Cloud project and enabling the Natural Language and Knowledge Graph Search APIs
- Linking billing, creating an API key and restricting it to those two APIs
- The optional Anthropic key and the lessons that use it
- Diagnosing the five common setup errors from their messages
- How entity analysis is billed and what audits cost at three site sizes
- How the six browser tools handle your key and your content
The audit runs on two Google APIs on a single key: Cloud Natural Language, which extracts entities from your content, and the Knowledge Graph Search API, which matches them to Google’s graph. The lesson spends the most time on the step that catches the most people: the Natural Language API refuses to serve until a billing account is linked, even though free-tier usage is never charged. It also makes the case for restricting the key to the two APIs it needs, so that a key pasted into a chat or a screen share can only ever run some entity extraction rather than spend across a whole project.
The cost section uses the real numbers. Google bills entity analysis per thousand characters, rounded up, with 5,000 units free each month, and Knowledge Graph lookups are free up to 100,000 a day. At this course’s measured average page length, a 1,000-page audit costs nothing, 10,000 pages costs about $46 and 50,000 pages about $229; the course’s own 647-page audit used 2,917 units and cost $0. Every tool shows its estimate before running, and the lesson recommends screenshotting it for whoever approves budget. The tools themselves are static pages with no MLforSEO server behind them, so a key goes only to Google or Anthropic and content is never uploaded.
This lesson continues Module 0, Start Here, in The AI-powered Entity Audit, and leads into the course map and then Module 1 on entity foundations. It suits anyone starting the course, including those who have never created an API key, and anyone who needs to quote a client a defensible cost before an audit begins.