Cadence per plan
Automatic scans run on fixed weekdays. Starter, Growth and Scale share the same twice-weekly schedule; the Agency plan scans on Mondays; daily scanning is the Enterprise differentiator.
On each scan day, every active prompt runs across the platforms and countries it’s set to run in (all five platforms by default) — see What happens in a scan for what a single scan actually does. Plan details and current limits live on Plans & limits and surfais.com/pricing.
Your scan days are set per organisation, not per brand: once your account has activated — you’ve run your first baseline scan — every brand you track is scanned on the same schedule, including brands you add later (a new brand’s own free baseline is still there to get its first reading immediately rather than waiting for the next scan day). On each scan day each of your brands is queued as its own scan, so brands run in parallel rather than strictly one after another — as far as free scanning capacity allows. That capacity is shared across every Surfais customer, so if you track many brands they may complete in waves rather than all at the same moment, but no brand’s results are held back until every other brand has finished. The one exception: if two of your brands share a tracked competitor, or one of your brands is listed as another’s competitor, that day’s scan runs all of your brands in a single batch instead, so the scores those brands share are written once and stay consistent — every brand is still scanned, the results just arrive in sequence rather than in parallel.
Scan days follow UTC
Automatic scans fire early in the UTC day. If you’re located west of the UK, your scan can land the evening before your local calendar date; if you’re east of the UK, it can land later in your local day than the weekday label suggests. In practice this only matters near the day boundary — most users simply see their scan appear “this morning” — but if you’re ever checking “did Thursday’s scan run yet?” against the clock, UTC is the calendar that decides it, not your local timezone.This is a deliberate, consistent choice — every organisation is scanned against the same UTC calendar, regardless of where its team is based, so cadence stays predictable and comparable across accounts.
Trial scan schedule
While your organisation is on a trial, the weekday cadence above doesn’t apply yet. Instead, Surfais runs scans on a fixed drip tied to the trial itself, aiming for readings around days 1, 4, and 7 — near the start, middle, and end of your trial. The drip starts once you’ve activated: your first reading is the free baseline scan you trigger yourself, and the remaining drip scans then run automatically. If you never run the baseline, no automatic scans fire — Surfais deliberately doesn’t scan a brand whose setup you haven’t confirmed. Once you convert to a paid plan, scanning switches over to your plan’s weekday cadence from the table above. An Agency plan trial is the exception: it has no drip. Each client brand’s first reading is its free baseline scan on day 1, and after that the Agency plan scans on Mondays, trial or not.Your free baseline scan
Every new brand gets one free scan the first time you set it up — it doesn’t draw from your monthly manual-scan allowance, and it doesn’t wait for the next scheduled cadence day. This first scan is deliberately a moment you choose to trigger yourself, because it becomes your baseline: the number every later reading is measured against. Your dashboard walks you through a short “get scan-ready” checklist first — adding competitors and confirming your brand aliases materially change what that first scan finds, so we ask you to complete them (or explicitly confirm you want to run without) before kicking it off. Once you run it, automatic scanning takes over from there — on the trial drip if you’re still trialling, or your plan’s weekday cadence if you’ve already converted or are trialling the Agency plan. See Quickstart: your first scan for the full walkthrough of onboarding through to that first scan, and Manual scans & allowances for how the ongoing monthly allowance works after your baseline is in.What if I add a new brand later?
If you’re tracking multiple brands, each new brand gets its own free baseline scan the same way — set it up, work through its checklist, and run its first scan. One nuance worth knowing: once your organisation is active and scanning automatically, every brand you track is included on each scan day, so a brand you add can occasionally get picked up by the next scheduled run before you’ve clicked its own baseline button. Either way, that first scan is free — you’re never charged a manual scan for a brand’s baseline.Related pages
What happens in a scan
The full pipeline behind every scan, automatic or manual.
Manual scans & allowances
Running a scan on demand between automatic runs.
Plans & limits
Full comparison of what each plan includes.
Your trial
How the trial period works end to end.