Content Impact
How SurfacedBy tracks AI visibility after you publish content or complete an action, and where the results appear.
After you publish a page or complete a plan item, SurfacedBy compares later check results with where you stood before. It reports whether your AI visibility moved after you acted. That is correlation, not proof: SurfacedBy does not claim your action alone caused a change.
Nothing is re-crawled or re-checked specially for this. The comparison reads the same results as the rest of the dashboard, so a result can only change when your regular Daily Checks or Full Checks test the prompt again. See Measurement Scope for how those results combine.
When tracking starts
Plan items. Moving an item on your plan to in progress records a baseline of the metrics it targets. Marking it done starts the watch, and records the baseline then if there is none yet. Evaluation starts 24 hours after the item is marked done and continues for 60 days. If no check tests the target within that time, the result is inconclusive. Items reach your plan through Add to Plan; see Opportunities.
Content projects. Tracking starts when the page goes live: when you publish live to a connected target, or when you confirm the live URL of a draft or of content you published yourself (see Publishing). A content watch runs for 120 days, because AI platforms usually take weeks to cite a new page. LinkedIn posts are not watched this way, since they do not add a page to your site.
The citation timeline
Each live content project sits on a timeline from its publish date. The timeline marks about 1 week (when new pages are typically first cited), 3 weeks (3 in 4 pages), and 5 weeks (9 in 10 pages). These markers come from published industry data on how fast new pages get cited; they are not a forecast for your page.
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Cited | Your brand is cited or named in the current AI answers for the project's prompt, however long ago the page was published. |
| On track | Not cited yet, and published up to 19 days ago. |
| Still tracking | Not cited yet, published 20 to 37 days ago. |
| Worth fixing | Not cited after 37 days, and your latest robots.txt check shows an AI crawler used for live answers is blocked. The likely cause, with a Fix crawl access link. |
| Worth a look | Not cited after 37 days, and crawler access looks open. The page may be hard to find or too thin. |
| Check access | Not cited after 37 days, and there is no robots.txt check yet. Run an access check to find out. |
What is measured
For a content project, the project's prompt is compared per AI platform against the baseline. The outcome reads as one of:
- Tracking after publishing. The prompt has not been re-checked since the page went live. This is the normal state for a new page.
- Now cited in AI answers. Your brand is cited on a platform where it was not before.
- Now mentioned in AI answers. Your brand is named, without a link, on a platform where it was not before.
- Visibility improved. Your brand was present before and after, and its position moved up.
- Visibility decreased. Your brand dropped off a platform, or it was present before and after and its position moved down.
- No measured change yet. The prompt was re-checked and nothing moved.
- Not enough data yet. There was no baseline to compare against, or the watch ended before the prompt was re-checked.
The project also shows, per platform, whether your brand is present and whether the answer cites the published page itself. A citation of that exact URL is stronger evidence than a brand mention reached through another page.
For other plan items, what is compared depends on the target:
| Target | Compared against the baseline |
|---|---|
| A prompt | Whether your brand is cited or named, per platform |
| A competitor | Your share of mentions against that competitor |
| A source | Whether that source appears in the same answers as your brand |
| A page | Which Content Checker issues were fixed or came back |
| Domain, technical, or social work | Your Visibility Score |
Confidence
A content outcome carries a confidence level based on which checks back it:
- High confidence. A change confirmed by a Full Check.
- Medium confidence. No change, confirmed by a Full Check.
- Directional. Seen only in Daily Checks so far.
For plan items, a baseline older than 30 days when the result is evaluated lowers the confidence, because more has changed in between than the one action.
Where results appear
- The content project. The After publishing card on the right shows the outcome, the citation timeline, the live URL, and the per-platform breakdown.
- Actions > History. Each published project shows its timeline state. See Actions.
- Reports. The Content Impact section lists published content and how AI platforms responded. See Reports.
- Opportunities and your plan. The opportunity and plan item a project came from show its outcome.
- The Today feed and the workspace home. Pages in the Worth fixing state are flagged there. On the Today feed they are grouped into one notice that links to the crawler access fix.
If a page comes down, Not live anymore? > Mark as not live on the After publishing card stops tracking. See Publishing.