Alerts

SurfacedBy sends alerts when something about your AI visibility is worth your attention. Alerts arrive in the dashboard's notification bell, by email, as browser notifications or Slack direct messages if you turn them on, and through outbound webhooks if your workspace has registered one. By default, alert emails go only to the workspace owner and to a domain's assigned Owner; see Who gets alert emails. Most alert categories can be turned on or off; see Settings.

Movement alerts compare a check with the previous check of the same kind (Daily Check with Daily Check, Full Check with Full Check), and only when both checks measured enough answers to trust the move. Daily Check rotation refreshes part of your tracked answers and does not count as changing your prompts.

Alert types

Your own visibility

• Your First Results Are Ready - a brand's first check has completed, so there is data to look at. It fires once per brand, for its first completed Daily Check or Full Check; a later first check of the other kind does not fire it again, and a free AI visibility check run before you subscribed does not count.
• Visibility Score Dropped - your Visibility Score fell by more than your alert sensitivity allows (see Thresholds).
• Brand Coverage Changed - Brand Coverage moved up or down by more than your alert sensitivity allows.
• Dropped on [Platform] - your brand stopped appearing in the comparable answers measured on an AI platform. It compares the exact prompts checked with their previously known answers and requires enough measured answers and prior mentions. Other tracked answers on that platform may still mention you.
• Prompt Coverage Changed - the tracked prompt coverage behind the two scores is substantially different, so they cannot be compared reliably. It replaces movement alerts for that comparison; movement alerts resume when coverage is comparable.

Competitors

• A Competitor Passed You - a competitor in your competitor rankings moved above you on Brand Coverage, measured over the same tracked prompts in the same check.
• A Competitor Is Pulling Ahead - a competitor already ahead of you raised their own Brand Coverage and widened the gap. It fires only when their coverage rose, so a gap that widened only because your own coverage fell does not trigger it.
• A Competitor Is Fading - a competitor's Brand Coverage fell materially. The prompts they stopped appearing on are the cheapest ones to win.
• You Passed a Competitor - your Brand Coverage moved above a competitor who had been ahead of you.
• New Competitor Detected - a domain that now appears consistently in AI answers about your market has been added to your competitor rankings. One alert names up to three new competitors. Competitors you add yourself do not trigger it. See Competitors.

Wins

• Cited in AI - a page or prompt you acted on through SurfacedBy is now cited in an AI answer where it was not before. The alert names the platforms and states plainly that this is a correlation, not proof your work caused it. When Content Operations is enabled for your workspace, the Today feed can turn a citation win into a LinkedIn post draft.
• Milestones - the AI Mentions count on your unfiltered Overview reaching 100, and your Visibility Score improving for three consecutive monthly comparisons using the latest Full Check in each of four calendar months. AI Mentions counts the latest tracked answers that name or cite your brand, once per answer, rather than adding the same answers again on every check. Each milestone opens its own shareable card with the count or score gain when it was earned. Earlier achievements remain available with their historical measurement basis labeled.

Your site

• Site health issue - a crawler access problem found on your site, for example an AI crawler blocked by robots.txt or your site no longer allowing itself to be indexed, with the fix to make. Crawler access is checked every day, independently of your Daily and Full Checks, because a blocked crawler costs citations silently. A homepage instruction excluding all search crawlers or Googlebot from indexing is confirmed by another genuine page response at least 45 minutes later before a critical alert opens. Restrictions for other named crawlers are shown separately. Unreadable or incomplete responses do not establish recovery; a nofollow instruction controls links and does not exclude the page from indexing.
• Site health resolved - the same finding is no longer happening on your site.

Themes

Brand Themes are available on Professional and Agency. See Brand Themes.

• Theme gaining ground - a theme becomes established across two comparable Full Checks after three baseline checks. Themes can appear on Brand Themes before there is enough history for an alert.
• Theme fading - coverage falls by at least five percentage points and 25% relative to each of three baseline checks, and stays lower across two comparable Full Checks. Both alerts compare the same answer cells and restart their evidence window when the theme vocabulary changes.
• Theme added / Theme retired - a theme was added to, or archived from, your Brand Themes based on the latest AI answers. A retired theme keeps its history.

Scheduled reports

• [Report name] stopped sending - a scheduled report paused because the teammate it sends as can no longer open the brand or manage reports. It goes to members who can manage reports for that brand, and to the report's creator while they can still open it, so someone can take the report over. See Reports.

Workspace

• A teammate joined - someone accepted an invitation to your workspace. The workspace owner and admins are told who joined, and the new member gets a welcome notice.

Settings

Settings > Notifications has one switch per alert category:

Prompt Coverage Changed appears when any of the movement categories above is on. The same page holds:

• Alert emails for this workspace: Default, Always email me, or Never email me. See Who gets alert emails.
• Email notifications, the switch for every email: the weekly digest and all alert emails. Turning it off stops them in every workspace, whatever you chose above, and keeps in-app notifications on.
• Weekly digest, one Monday summary email covering the domains you can open in every workspace you belong to. See Weekly digest.
• Alert sensitivity (Standard, High, or Low); see Thresholds.
• In-app notifications and a Minimum severity for the bell: All notifications, Warnings and critical, or Critical only.
• New conversations and publishers to review (Editor and above). A conversation worth replying to, or a publisher worth pitching, notifies every member who can act on it for that domain, grouped into one bell item per domain. Turn it off to leave them to your teammates.

Every alert email also links to an email preference page that works without signing in, where you can switch each category on or off, and carries a one-click unsubscribe from alert emails.

These settings are personal. Every workspace member who can see a domain receives its alerts in the app according to their own switches and sensitivity, so one teammate turning a category off does not change what anyone else receives. A member whose access is limited to certain domains receives alerts only for those domains.

Workspace webhook alerts use Standard sensitivity independently of these personal switches.

Who gets alert emails

Alerts appear in the app for everyone who can see the domain and has the category switched on. Email is narrower, so a team does not flood every inbox:

• By default, alert emails for a domain go to the workspace owner and to the member assigned as that domain's Owner.
• Each member can change this for themselves, per workspace, under Settings > Notifications > Alert emails for this workspace. Always email me sends you alert emails for every domain you can see in that workspace; Never email me keeps them in the app only; Default follows the rule above.
• The Email notifications switch still has the last word: when it is off, you get no alert emails from any workspace.

An alert email still covers only the categories you have switched on.

Delivery channels

• Notification bell: every alert lands in the dashboard's notification bell. Similar notifications share a row.
• Email: sent to the members described in Who gets alert emails. Alerts from one check are batched into a single email. If the same alert repeats while its notification is still unread, the repeat is added to that notification rather than emailed again, and a reminder email goes out at most once a week. Theme, milestone, scheduled report and workspace notices are not emailed.
• Browser notifications and Slack direct messages: turn either on under Settings > Notifications. Alerts then also reach a connected browser or arrive as a Slack direct message. Prompt Coverage Changed stays in the bell and email. Quiet hours pause email, browser and Slack notifications; the bell stays immediate, and current browser and Slack alerts are grouped when quiet hours end.
• Webhooks: outbound webhooks send alert.triggered events, so you can route alerts into Slack, PagerDuty, or an internal tool. On a paid plan, workspace admins and owners register endpoints under Settings > Integrations > Webhooks. See Webhook events.

How often an alert can repeat

Each alert type from a check (your visibility, your competitors, and Your First Results Are Ready) reaches you at most once per brand per day. A workspace that tracks several brands hears about each of them separately: an alert about one brand never silences the same alert for another.

Thresholds

One Alert sensitivity setting governs how large a move has to be before any threshold-based alert fires, across your own metrics and your competitors' alike:

Crossing alerts, where you and a competitor swap places, ignore the setting because the crossing itself is the news however small the move that caused it. Dropped on [Platform] also ignores it, because it fires only when your mentions on a platform fall to none.