Deep Tracking Overview
Deep Tracking (also called Enhanced Monitoring) is a premium feature that unlocks the full suite of competitive intelligence for individual competitors. While standard tracking covers AI mentions and organic rankings, deep tracking adds ad creatives, landing page monitoring, AI mentions discovery, and paid keyword attribution.
Enabling Deep Tracking
Go to the Competitors page and find the Monitor toggle column. Click the toggle to enable deep tracking for any competitor. On Starter plans, the Monitor column shows an "Upgrade" badge linking to the billing page instead of a toggle.
When you first enable deep tracking, Surva.ai triggers an immediate data collection that includes:
- Fetching ad creatives from DataForSEO and the Google Ads Transparency Center
- Crawling the competitor's landing page for messaging, features, CTAs, and pricing
- Refreshing organic keywords and overall competitor data
If you reach your plan's deep tracking limit, the toggle shows an error: "Your [plan] plan allows tracking [max] competitors for ads. Please disable tracking on another competitor first, or upgrade your plan."
What Deep Tracking Provides
- Ad Creatives - full ad headlines, descriptions, display URLs with first seen and last seen dates. The primary data source is the DataForSEO Google Ads Search API; the Google Ads Transparency Center is used as a fallback. Ads are deduplicated by headline plus final URL so you see unique creatives, not duplicates
- Landing Page Content - page titles, H1 headlines, value propositions, feature lists, benefits, CTAs, pricing information, and messaging themes extracted from the competitor's main page
- Landing Page Change Tracking - detects when competitors update their landing page messaging and logs what changed with before and after comparisons. Tracked fields include headlines, features, benefits, pricing, meta descriptions, and CTA text
- AI Mentions Discovery - discovers prompts where the competitor appears across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Discovery scans have a 2-day cooldown between refreshes per competitor
- Paid Keyword Attribution - links competitors to the keywords they bid on in paid search
Competitor Detail Tabs Requiring Deep Tracking
Several tabs on the Competitor Detail Page require deep tracking to display full data:
- Ads Library - shows full ad creative history. Without deep tracking (or on Starter plan), users see a blurred preview with an upgrade overlay
- Website - shows current landing page summary and change history with a refresh button. Available on Growth plan and above
- Backlinks - shows domain backlink data. Available on Business plan only; other plans see a blurred preview
The Overview, AI Visibility, Prompts, Brand Mentions, and Messaging tabs are available with standard tracking on all plans.
Plan Limits
| Plan | Deep Tracked Competitors | Ads Tracking |
|---|---|---|
| Starter ($59/mo) | 0 - not available | No |
| Growth ($99/mo) | Up to 15 | Yes |
| Business ($299/mo) | Up to 50 | Yes |
You can check your current usage and remaining slots from the competitor tracking limits API or by watching the toggle behavior on the Competitors page.
Data Refresh Schedule
| Data Type | Schedule | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ad creatives | Every 7 days per competitor | Checks adsLastRefreshed timestamp; manual refresh also available |
| Landing pages | Daily at 5:00 AM Eastern | Crawls all active competitors with a 2-second delay between requests |
| Organic rankings | Daily | Snapshots for all competitors |
| AI mentions | Weekly | Manual refresh available once per 7 days |
| Domain rank | Weekly | Refreshes domain authority scores for all brands and competitors |
| On first enable | Immediately | Fetches ads, crawls landing page, gets organic keywords (top 50) |
Disabling Deep Tracking
When you disable deep tracking for a competitor:
- All ad data for that competitor is permanently deleted
- All paid keyword attribution data is permanently deleted
- Landing page history is preserved for reference
- The competitor remains in your list with standard tracking (AI mentions and organic rankings continue)
You can re-enable deep tracking at any time to begin collecting ad and keyword data again from that point forward.
API Data Sources
Deep tracking collects data from multiple API providers:
- DataForSEO Google Ads Search API - primary source for ad creatives at approximately $0.002 per request, returning up to 40 ads per call
- Google Ads Transparency Center - fallback source used when DataForSEO does not return results. Filters ads by advertiser name, display URL, final URL, and domain matching
- DataForSEO Organic Keywords - competitor's top organic keyword positions
- Landing Page Crawler - Surva.ai's own crawler that extracts structured content from competitor landing pages
Trial vs Paid Access
During the 7-day free trial, you can discover AI mentions for any competitor without enabling deep tracking. On paid plans, AI mentions discovery requires deep tracking to be enabled for the specific competitor. Ads tracking and landing page change tracking always require a Growth or Business plan.