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Once you have finished building your survey, you can share it with respondents in several ways: a direct URL, an embed on your website, or a link with pre-filled parameters from your panel or CRM. This page explains how to get your survey link, configure the return URL, work with URL parameters, and connect your survey responses to Pulse Classifier for analysis.

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Survey status: draft and live

Every survey starts in draft status. While in draft, the survey is not accessible to respondents — the public survey URL returns an error. When you are ready to start collecting responses, change the survey status to live from the Settings tab.
Set your survey to live only after you have tested every question path, validated your skip logic, and confirmed your quotas are configured correctly. Respondents who complete the survey while it is live will have their responses stored permanently.
The survey link is automatically generated when you create a survey. To find it:
  1. Open the survey in the Survey Builder.
  2. Go to the Settings tab.
  3. The shareable URL is displayed in the survey configuration section. Click the copy icon to copy it to your clipboard.
The URL format is: https://app.smartinterview.io/{locale}/{survey-id}/ The {locale} segment sets the language for the survey interface (en, fr, or de). If you need to distribute the survey in a specific language, use the appropriate locale prefix in your link.

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Embedding the survey on a website

To embed the survey in a page on your website, use an <iframe> element: 
<iframe
  src="https://app.smartinterview.io/en/{survey-id}/"
  width="100%"
  height="700"
  frameborder="0"
  allow="microphone"
></iframe>
If your survey includes vocal questions or smartquestions, include allow="microphone" in the iframe tag. Without this attribute, browsers will block microphone access and respondents will not be able to record audio answers.

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URL parameters for pre-filling respondent data

You can pass data about each respondent through URL query parameters when you share the survey link. Smartinterview reads these parameters and makes them available for display conditions and return URL templates. For example, to pass a respondent’s identifier and their panel segment: 
https://app.smartinterview.io/en/{survey-id}/?respondent_id=abc123&segment=premium
Any URL parameter you append is automatically available in display conditions. You can also declare parameters formally in Settings → URL Parameters to give them types and use them in quota variable mode.

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Using user_id for respondent tracking

If you enable Include user ID in URL in the survey settings, Smartinterview uses the user_id parameter from the URL as the respondent identifier for that session. This is useful when distributing surveys through a panel that provides a unique respondent token. Set a fixed user_id in the settings if you want all respondents to share the same identifier (for testing or kiosk deployments). Leave it blank to use the value from the URL.

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Configuring the return URL

After a respondent completes the survey, you can redirect them to a URL of your choice. Configure this in Settings → Survey configuration → Return URL. The return URL supports template variables that are replaced with actual values at redirect time:
TemplateReplaced with
{{user_id}}The respondent’s user ID (from the URL parameter or session)
{{non_empty_count}}The number of non-empty answers the respondent submitted
{{field:Q1}}The respondent’s answer to the question with ID Q1
Example: To pass the respondent ID back to a panel platform: 
https://yourpanel.com/complete?respondent={{user_id}}&answers={{non_empty_count}}
A live preview of the return URL with placeholder values appears below the input field as you type.

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Viewing and exporting responses

Responses are accessible from the project view:
  1. Navigate to Projects and open the relevant project.
  2. Go to the Data section and select Survey responses.
  3. You can view individual responses, filter by date or status, and export the response data.
Each response is stored with a unique session ID and includes all answers — text, choice selections, transcriptions from vocal questions, and AI follow-up conversations.

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Linking responses to Pulse Classifier

If your survey includes open-ended text or vocal (transcribed) questions, you can send those responses directly to Pulse Classifier for topic coding and analysis without exporting and re-importing data.
1

Open the project

Navigate to Projects and open the project linked to your survey.
2

Go to Codification

Click the Codification section and select Survey as the data source (instead of File).
3

Select the survey question

Choose the survey and the specific question whose responses you want to classify. Smartinterview lists all text and vocal questions with response counts.
4

Run classification

Proceed through the topic generation and classification steps as you would for a file-based classification. The responses from your survey are used directly as the input dataset.
Link your survey to a project before you start distributing it. This ensures all responses are captured in the right project and are immediately available for classification once fieldwork ends.