Frequently asked questions

Summary#

These are the questions that do not belong to any one feature: how credits work, what a plan buys, where the data comes from, what happens to a teammate's usage, what we do with your information. Each answer is short and points at the article that owns the detail. Questions about a specific tool live on that tool's own page.

Overview#

Two ideas answer a surprising share of everything below, so they are worth having before you read on.

A credit meters one run of one tool. Prices are fixed per tool and never change between plans; your plan decides how many credits you get each month, not what a run is worth. Free and light tools keep working after the allowance is spent. See How credits work.

A workspace belongs to one account. Teammates join the owner's workspace to see and work with the owner's data, but each person's own plan decides what they are allowed to run. See What teammates share.

Getting started#

What is Metric Vault? An SEO and AI-search intelligence platform. It measures how your site performs in Google and how your brand appears in AI answer engines, from one workspace, with the tools grouped by the job they do rather than by the data behind them. See What is Metric Vault AI?.

Do I need a credit card to sign up? No. Accounts start on the Free plan, which needs no payment details. See Create your account.

What can I do without paying? The ten technical SEO tools, which fetch and check your own pages and cost nothing to run, plus the eleven public free tools that need no account at all. See What you get on Free and Free tools, no account needed.

Do I have to install anything? No. Metric Vault runs in the browser. You can optionally install it as an app from your browser's install prompt, and there is an optional Chrome extension for checking a page as you browse. See The Chrome extension.

Where do I start? Run a Domain Overview on your own site, then a Site Audit. See Quick start: your first result in five minutes.

Credits and cost#

What does a credit cost me? Nothing on its own. Credits are the unit your monthly allowance is measured in. The per-tool price list is Credit cost table.

Which tools actually use up my allowance? Only runs priced at 3 credits or more are blocked when the allowance is spent. Tools priced at 0 or 1 keep working all month on a paid plan. See Quotas and rate limits.

Do unused credits roll over? No. The allowance resets at the start of each calendar month, in UTC, not on your subscription anniversary. See Tracking your usage.

Can I buy extra credits without changing plan? No. There is no top-up. Extra headroom comes from moving up a tier. See Plans and pricing.

Am I charged if a run fails? No. A run is charged once it produces a result. A failure before that point is not added to your usage. See How credits work.

Is a cached result cheaper? No. The cache saves the call to our data provider, not your credit. See Result caching and freshness.

Does reopening a saved result cost anything? No. Reopening, exporting and sharing a stored result are all free. Only running the tool again costs credits. See Saved Work.

Why is my usage figure higher than the number of big reports I ran? Because 1-credit runs are added to the same counter even though they are never blocked. See Tracking your usage.

Plans and billing#

Which plan do I need? Compare them on Full plan comparison. The short version is in Plan capability matrix, which also marks which lines the platform enforces.

Is there a free trial? Yes, on the paid plans. See The 14-day free trial.

How do I change or cancel? From your account's subscription controls; both are self-service. See Upgrading and downgrading and Cancelling your subscription.

I upgraded and nothing changed. Why? The plan is granted when the subscription becomes active, and the app reads it on the next load. See My plan did not update after paying.

Where are my invoices? In the billing portal, not in the dashboard. See Invoices and receipts.

Can I get a refund? Refunds are handled case by case by email. See Refunds.

Data and accuracy#

Where does the data come from? Live search data from our search-data provider, direct fetches of your own pages for the technical tools, and queries put to the AI engines for the visibility tools. See Where the data comes from.

How fresh is it? An identical repeat run can be served from a shared cache for anything between 12 hours and 10 days, depending on how fast that kind of data actually moves. The per-tool lifetimes are in Result caching and freshness.

Why do your numbers differ from Google Search Console? Search Console reports what your site actually received. Third-party search data estimates a whole market from measurement of the results pages. They answer different questions and will never match exactly. See Google Search Console.

Are the AI-visibility figures measured or estimated? Measured. The visibility tools put real queries to the AI engines and record what comes back. See Visibility Overview.

Why did I get no results for my domain? Usually the domain is too new or too small to appear in provider data, or the query was too narrow. See A tool returned no data.

Can I trust an AI-written recommendation? Treat it as a well-informed draft built from your result and the live results page, not as an instruction. Read it before acting. See Get Recommendations.

Teams and access#

Can more than one person use my account? Yes, by inviting them to your workspace rather than sharing a password. Seats are capped by your plan. See Inviting teammates and Seats and plan limits.

Do teammates spend my credits? No. Usage is recorded against the account that ran the tool, and each person's own plan decides what they can run. A teammate on Free can use the free tools inside your workspace and open your saved results, but cannot run paid ones. See Team and workspace billing.

Can a teammate see everything I have? They see the workspace's shared resources: monitored competitors, schedules, saved analyses and reports. What each role can change is in Roles and what each can do.

Can I hand my workspace to someone else? Ownership transfer is covered in Workspace ownership.

Reports and sharing#

Can I send a report to someone without an account? Yes. Create a public link; anyone with the address can read it, no sign-in needed, and you can delete it at any time. See Sharing a result by link.

What formats can I export? PDF, Excel, CSV and JSON. See Exporting results.

Can I put my own logo on a report? Yes, from Pro upwards. See White-label reports.

Can reports run on a schedule? Yes, with the result emailed to an address you choose. See Scheduled reports.

Where do my past runs go? Every successful run is saved automatically and kept for 90 days. See Saved Work.

Privacy and security#

Do you sell my data? No.

Do you use my data to train AI models? No. See What data we store.

Who can see what I run? You, and the members of your workspace. See Authorization model.

How long do you keep things? Retention differs by data type and is listed in full in Data retention and deletion.

Can I get a copy of my data, or have it deleted? Yes to both. See Exporting your data, Deleting your account and GDPR and compliance.

Is there two-factor authentication? Not today. The Security tile on the Account screen reports this honestly as 2FA off. Use a long, unique password from a password manager, and Log Out All if you suspect exposure. See Account security.

Interface and languages#

Which languages is the interface available in? English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Russian, on every plan. See Supported languages.

Are emails translated too? No. Alert and report emails are sent in English. See Notification catalog.

Is there a dark mode? Yes, toggled in the top bar. See Light and dark mode.

Is there a mobile app? No native app. The site works on a phone and can be installed from your browser's install prompt.

Are there keyboard shortcuts? A few, and Ctrl + K is the one worth learning. The complete list is Keyboard shortcuts.

Automation and integration#

Can I connect Google Search Console? Yes. See Google Search Console.

Is there an API? Yes, a single analysis endpoint authenticated with an API key. See API overview and POST /api/v1/analyze.

Can I get alerted when a competitor changes something? Yes, by email, Slack or a webhook of your own. See Competitor monitor.

Can Metric Vault publish to my site or social accounts? To social channels, yes: the composer posts to every connected channel at once, immediately or on a schedule. Pushing content to a content management system is not enabled today; the Publish Integrations screen reports its status and refuses every push rather than half-publishing. See Publishing and scheduling posts and Publishing to your website.

When something is wrong#

A tool failed. What now? Read the message on screen and look it up in Error message reference, then follow A tool failed to run.

Is there an outage? Open System status in the site footer before reporting anything widespread.

How do I contact a human? By email. The addresses, and the six details that get a problem solved in one reply, are in Contacting support.

Is there live chat? No. The in-app assistant answers product questions but cannot see your account, change anything, or open a support case.