Scheduling scans and email alerts

What scheduled scans do

A scheduled scan runs on its own, on a cadence you choose, so you do not have to remember to press Run. It is the difference between checking in when you happen to think of it and getting a steady, comparable trend you can act on.

Scheduling is set per project: one schedule per project. Scheduled monitoring is included with your plan and does not use your monthly refreshes: the schedule just runs on its cadence (a daily one once a day, a weekly one once a week).

Setting one up

When a project is not yet monitored, its Home shows a Start monitoring step: pick a cadence, confirm, and it sets up the schedule and runs a baseline scan. To change it later, open the project's Monitoring tab and edit the AI Visibility + SEO track:

1. Pick a frequency. The options depend on your plan: the free plan runs a weekly scan, and paid plans run daily monitoring.
2. Choose the time (shown in UTC) and, for weekly, the day.
3. Turn on the email alerts you want (see below).
4. Save. The schedule can be paused, resumed or edited at any time.

A schedule runs the project's prompts, so the project needs at least one prompt before you can schedule it. The Monitoring tab also controls the project's other automatic tracks (see The Monitoring tab).

Email alerts

You can be emailed:

• When a scan completes with a notable change, with a short summary of how it moved versus the previous run. Routine runs with no real change don't email you, so a daily schedule won't fill your inbox.
• When your visibility drops by more than a threshold you set.
• When a competitor pulls ahead of you.
• When a scheduled scan fails, so you know there is no fresh data.

By default alerts go to your account email. You can point them at a different address on the schedule.

Spotting automatic runs

Scheduled scans are labelled Scheduled in your scan history, and they show up as a distinctly coloured dot on your progress charts (with a matching entry in the chart legend). That makes it easy to tell an automatic run apart from one you started by hand.

Good to know

• Runs happen on our servers, so you do not need to keep a tab open. Results appear on your dashboard when they finish.
• If a run is interrupted (for example while we deploy an update), it is retried automatically and picks up where it left off, so it may take a little longer but still finishes.
• If a run keeps failing, we stop retrying and email you with what happened, and whether it is something in your setup to fix (for example a domain we could not reach) or a problem on our side.
• If you later remove all of a project's prompts, its scheduled runs are skipped (there is nothing to scan) and we email you once to add prompts. The schedule resumes on its next run once you do.
• If another scan is still running when a scheduled one is due, we wait and try again shortly rather than run two at once.
• At busy times a scan can be queued for a few minutes before it starts. You will see a note on the scan page while it waits, and it keeps running on our servers even if you leave.
• Scheduled monitoring is included with your plan and keeps running even when your manual refreshes are used up (see Scheduled monitoring and refreshes).
• Want to see the impact of a specific change instead? You can still run a one-off scan any time (see Re-running and comparing scans).