General

What is Surfaceable?

Surfaceable is an SEO and AI Visibility platform. It runs a full technical SEO audit across your site (12 checks, up to 500 pages) and tracks how often your brand is mentioned by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Do I need to install anything on my site?

No. Surfaceable works entirely by crawling your public URLs — there's no script tag, plugin, or code to install. Just add your URL and run an audit.

How is Surfaceable different from Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog?

Those tools focus on keyword rankings, backlink analysis, and large-scale crawls. Surfaceable focuses on two things those tools don't do well: deep technical health scoring with actionable fix guidance, and AI Visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

SEO Audit

How many pages does an audit crawl?

The Free plan crawls up to 25 pages. Starter: 100. Growth: 250. Pro: 500. You can also set a lower page limit per audit.

How long does an audit take?

Most audits complete in 30–90 seconds. Larger sites (250–500 pages) may take 3–5 minutes. Core Web Vitals data adds extra time as it calls the Google PageSpeed Insights API.

Can I audit any website, not just my own?

Yes. You can audit any publicly accessible website. This is useful for competitor analysis.

Does the audit affect my site's performance or logs?

Minimally. The crawler makes standard HTTP requests, one page at a time, with a short delay between requests. It uses a clear User-Agent string so you can identify it in your server logs.

Why is my score different from [another tool]?

Every tool uses different scoring algorithms and weighs different factors. Surfaceable's score is based on its own 12-check framework. Treat scores from different tools as separate signals rather than directly comparable numbers.

AI Visibility

How does AI Visibility actually work?

Surfaceable sends real prompts to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity via their APIs and analyses the responses for brand mentions. See AI Visibility Overview for a full explanation.

How often is AI Visibility data refreshed?

On Starter, weekly. On Growth and Pro, daily. You can also trigger a manual refresh at any time.

Can I customise the prompts used?

Yes, on Growth and Pro plans you can add custom prompts to the default set. Go to AI Visibility → Prompts on your project.

Why does my brand appear on ChatGPT but not Claude?

Different AI platforms use different training data and retrieval mechanisms. ChatGPT's knowledge of brands is influenced by Bing search results; Claude's by its training corpus and web search. See Supported AI Platforms for optimisation tips specific to each platform.

MCP Server

Do I need a Surfaceable account to use the MCP server?

No. The MCP server is standalone and open source. It runs locally on your machine and doesn't require a Surfaceable account or API key for most tools. Only check_vitals needs a Google API key (and only to get real data rather than simulated).

Which MCP clients are supported?

Any client that implements the Model Context Protocol. This includes Claude Code, Cursor, and others. See MCP Server — Installation.

Privacy & Data

Does Surfaceable store the content of pages it crawls?

Surfaceable stores audit results (scores, issues, metadata) but not the full HTML content of crawled pages.

Is my data shared with third parties?

Audit data is used solely to generate your reports. Core Web Vitals queries are sent to Google's PageSpeed Insights API. AI Visibility queries are sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity APIs. See the Privacy Policy for full details.

Can I delete my data?

Yes. Go to Settings and select Delete account to permanently remove all your data. Individual projects can be deleted from the project settings page.