How Serpel works: the core concepts

What are workspaces and projects?

Your account comes with a workspace. The workspace holds the projects you own, your credit balance and your plan. A project stands for one website: a domain plus a market, made of a country and a language. Everything Serpel measures belongs to a project, and every paid check in a project is paid from the workspace that owns it.

People get access per project, in one of 3 roles: viewers read, editors also change settings and start checks, owners also remove members and delete the project. The projects guide explains settings and roles, the account guide covers tokens and data export.

Where does Serpel get its data?

Connected sources sync in the background and cost nothing. The guides for search data, web analytics and the codebase scan show how to connect each one.

What is a job?

Anything that takes longer than a moment runs as a background job, so you can close the browser while it works. There are 9 job types: “Website crawl”, “Rank check”, “AI visibility”, “Monitoring”, “Search data sync”, “Web analytics sync”, “Codebase snapshot”, “Generate recommendations”, “Bing index sync”. A job is “Queued”, “Running”, “Completed”, “Failed”, “Cancelled”. The History page of a project lists every job with its result, and you can cancel or retry jobs there. See history and exports.

How do credits fit in?

Credits pay for the paid checks: rank checks, AI checks and keyword research, which Serpel buys from data providers, and the pages the crawler fetches. Before a paid job starts, Serpel reserves its highest possible price. When the job ends, only what was delivered is charged and the rest goes back to your balance. Reading results, syncing your own data, reports and opportunities never cost credits. The credits guide has the full price list.

What is monitoring?

Monitoring repeats the rank checks for all tracked keywords and the AI checks for all prompts of a project on a schedule: daily, every three days or weekly, at an hour you pick. A weekly crawl can run alongside. Each monitoring run writes a report with what moved, which Serpel can email and post to Slack, Discord or your own webhook. Scheduled rank checks wait in the provider’s queue and cost less than checks you start by hand. The monitoring guide shows how to set it up.

What are opportunities and tasks?

Opportunities are recommendations that Serpel derives from your data with fixed rules, without AI: keywords just outside the top positions, pages with a low click rate, missing pages, technical blockers and more. Each gets a score from the expected extra clicks, the confidence and the effort, so the most useful work comes first. The opportunities guide lists the rules.

Tasks are your own to-do items for a project. You manage them through the CLI and the REST API, and after each crawl Serpel checks whether the issues behind a task are resolved.

Which terms should you know?

Where to go next