What runs automatically

Summary#

Four kinds of work happen in Metric Vault while you are logged out: monitored competitor pages are re-fetched, tracked keywords are re-checked against Google, report schedules that have come due are fired, and tracked brands are measured across AI models. This page explains what each one does, how often it really runs, and what lands in front of you afterwards. Nothing here costs a button press, and nothing here starts until you configure it.

Purpose#

Search results, competitor pages and AI answers all change on their own schedule, not yours. Finding out three weeks later that a rival cut their price or that your best keyword fell off page one is worth much less than finding out the same day.

Automation exists so that the checks you would otherwise have to remember happen on their own, and so that only the meaningful outcomes interrupt you. The design goal is a quiet product: the checks run constantly, and you hear about them only when something moved.

Overview#

Everything below follows the same shape. You register something to watch, it carries its own interval, and Metric Vault re-checks it once that interval has elapsed.

The scheduler wakes on a fifteen-minute cycle. On each pass it looks for items that have become due and processes them, then stops. That is why an item with a six-hour interval is not re-checked exactly six hours to the second after the last check, but within the first cycle after the six hours are up.

Each pass also has a cap on how much it will do, so one very large list cannot starve everything else. If you have more due items than the cap allows, the remainder are picked up on the next pass. In practice a backlog drains within minutes, not hours.

Automation limits and frequency holds the same information with the per-item caps and throttles spelled out.

How it works#

Competitor page checks#

Every URL you add in Competitors & Backlinks → Competitor Monitor is fetched on its own interval, and the page it returns is compared with the previous copy. Titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonical tags, social images, prices, navigation items, structured data, contact details, word count and link counts are all compared. Anything that moved is written into the change feed with a severity of High, Medium or Low.

The first check runs the moment you add the URL, and produces no changes — there is nothing yet to compare against. Every check after that can.

URLs added from the Competitor Monitor screen are saved with a six-hour interval, which is the value shown in the Every column of the Monitored URLs tab. A URL that fails to load is still marked as checked, so a broken page does not get retried every cycle.

Full detail is in Competitor monitor.

Keyword rank checks#

Every keyword you add in Track & Report → Rank Alerts is re-checked against Google roughly once a day: twenty-four hours after that keyword's own last check, not at a fixed hour for everyone. Each check records the position, and updates the best and worst positions the keyword has held.

An alert fires when the position is at least your drop threshold worse than the previous check, or when a keyword that was in the top 10 is no longer there. A keyword's very first check never alerts, because there is no previous position to compare with.

The screen's Next Auto Check tile counts down to 06:00 UTC as a rough guide. The check that matters for any single keyword is twenty-four hours after its own Last Checked time, which the table shows per row.

Full detail is in Rank alerts.

Due report schedules#

A schedule created in Track & Report → Scheduled Reports carries a next-run time. When that time passes, Metric Vault records a run against the schedule, increases its Runs count, sets the next run time, and posts a Scheduled report ready item into your notifications. When the schedule carries a recipient address, the Scheduled report ready email goes out at the same moment.

Schedules are a recurring prompt with a record attached, not a queue that produces a finished PDF on its own. Opening the run from your notifications takes you to the Scheduled Reports screen, where you can run the workflow and save the result.

Full detail is in Scheduled reports.

AI visibility measurement#

Metric Vault also measures how AI assistants answer questions about brands, so that a visibility trend exists before you go looking for one. A brand joins that tracker once you have run Visibility Overview, Prompt & Question Research or Prompt Tracking on it. From then on, up to five of the most recently used brands are measured about every twenty-two hours, using eight prompts each, across the AI models that are configured.

Those measurements are what fill the trend lines, the brand comparison and the visibility drop alerts. Full detail is in AI prompt tracking.

Where the results appear#

Notifications and alerts hub is the full-page view of that feed, and Every notification you can receive lists every notification with its trigger.

What does not run automatically#

Being clear here saves a long wait for something that is not coming.

• Tools do not re-run themselves. Running Domain Overview once does not put that domain on a schedule. Automation only touches things you registered on one of the screens above.
• A due schedule does not produce a finished report on its own. It records the run and tells you. See Scheduled reports.
• There is no weekly digest email. The Weekly Digest switch on your account is stored but nothing sends one today. A weekly schedule is the way to get a recurring summary.
• Alerts are not retried. If a Slack webhook or an email send fails, the change is still recorded in your feed, but the message is not attempted again.
• Nothing pages you. There are no SMS, push or phone notifications.

What it costs#

Registering a watch is free. Monitored URLs, rank alerts and report schedules cost no credits to create and no credits to re-check, and there is no cap on how many you can add. The tools those watches point you at are priced normally when you run them. See How credits work and Credit cost table.

Who can use it#

Automation you configure belongs to the workspace, so teammates see the same monitored URLs, rank alerts and schedules. See What teammates share.