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How the work flows

From the free daily checks to a merged change and its measured result: each stage, what you do, and what spends credits.

The stages at a glance

Every piece of work on your site goes through the same stages. Most of them run without you. You step in to approve ideas and, depending on your settings, to merge or paste the change.

Nothing runs while your agents are off, except Pip's measurements of work that already shipped. Turn agents on by picking a plan in Settings. See Turn your agents on.

1. Daily checks (free)

Once your agents are on, they check your site for free:

• Scout runs the daily checks once a day from 09:45 UTC. It compares your last 7 days of Search Console data with the 7 days before. It also checks your robots.txt, your sitemaps and up to 30 pages.
• Root sends your sitemaps to Google when they change, about every hour. This needs Search Console connected with Full or owner access. Where IndexNow is set up for your site, Root also tells search engines about pages that changed.
• Lumen crawls your whole site and runs Lighthouse on your homepage and two typical pages. How often depends on your plan's monthly credits: about every 30 days below 100 credits a month (Sprout), every two weeks at 100 or more (Climb), every week at 300 or more (Canopy).

These checks never spend your balance. They keep running when your credits run out, as long as your agents are on. With agents off, they stop too.

If your site has no report yet (you skipped it or haven't built one), agents first get to know it. Home shows Getting to know your site: agents crawl it, test its pages in PageSpeed, work out what you sell and research your searches. The crawl and PageSpeed tests are free. The research step is paid work and spends credits. Regular checks and reviews start after that.

2. Agents find ideas (spends credits)

Agents turn what they find into ideas for your site:

• Scout sorts what the daily checks found. It runs only when there are new findings. Small search swings wait until the checks have seen them 3 days running. Page, sitemap and data problems, and big drops, go at once.
• Sage reviews your site as often as your plan allows, taking turns between technical, keyword and content reviews.
• Pip checks in when the free checks find something it watches.

Each of these is paid work and spends credits from your balance at the pace your plan sets. See Budgets and Credits.

Limits that keep the list manageable:

• At most 3 new ideas a day per site.
• At most 15 ideas waiting at once (your report's actions don't count).
• For 14 days after a change ships for a page or search, agents add nothing new for it but fixes.

3. Ideas wait on Approvals

New ideas land on Approvals under Waiting for your OK. Home lists up to 3 of them under Needs you with an Approve pill.

Each card shows the idea, why it matters, and a Because line with the evidence when there is some. You have two buttons:

1. Approve sends it to Results. You see "Approved. Follow it on Results."
2. Drop tells agents to leave it. It moves to Dropped, where you can Approve it or Send back later.

An idea with no changes or new evidence for 14 days is dropped on its own. You can still restore it from Dropped. Your report's actions don't expire this way.

Only you, the account owner, can approve work. Agents can suggest it but never approve it.

Let agents start without asking

If you'd rather not approve each idea, open Settings > Connections, find New ideas, choose Start without asking, and click Save new ideas. Agents then start their own fixes, page changes, new pages and data updates within your budget. You can still pause or drop any of them. Your report's actions still wait for you. The default is Ask me first.

More on this stage: Approve work and Approvals.

4. The work runs (spends credits for pull requests)

Approved work moves to Results under Being worked on. Approved work goes ahead of other agent work.

• If you get pull requests (see stage 5), Trellis builds the change. That is paid work and spends credits.
• If you get prompts instead, Courier writes the prompt from the idea. That is free.

While it waits, the card says Queued for the builder. or gives the reason it's waiting. With prompts, it says Its prompt is being written.

Changed your mind? Until an agent starts, the card has Move back (back to waiting for your OK) and Drop. Once work starts, it reads Your agents are working on it. and stays approved.

Agents try once. If the attempt stops or fails, the card says so. Click Move back, then approve it again to retry.

If your balance can't cover the next job, Home shows Agents paused and a Needs you item with an Add credits pill: "Agents are paused until the balance covers the next job". You also get an email. Add credits on Billing and agents start again. They never switch to cheaper work to fit.

5. The change ships: pull request or prompt

How finished work reaches your site is set in Settings > Connections under How finished work reaches your site. Pick one and click Save finished work.

Daily data files in data/ follow the separate Data updates setting (Automatic by default). Only setting it to Paused stops those writes. See Data.

Without a connected GitHub repository, you always get prompts. See Connect GitHub and Ship changes.

Pull requests

Pull requests waiting for you show under Ready for you on Results, with the pill Waiting for your review (or Waiting for you when Ivy Link left a note on it). Home lists them under Needs you with a Review a change pill.

1. Click Review on GitHub to read the change.
2. Click Merge. Ivy Link merges only if the pull request is unchanged, has no conflicts, and every check on it passed. If no checks have run, it won't merge. If the card says "Merge it on GitHub" instead, merge it there.
3. On success you see "Merged. Your site goes live with it on its next build."

With Pull requests, Ivy Link opens pull requests from branches named ivylink/… and never pushes code to your main branch.

With Pull requests, merged for you, the pull request shows under Merging on its own with the pill Merging once checks pass. Ivy Link leaves it for you, with a note, when it conflicts, when your repository needs a review or a required check, when its checks haven't passed within an hour, or when the change touches a page. Every merged change stays on GitHub, where you can revert it.

Prompts

Prompts show under Ready for you on Results. Home lists them under Needs you with a Paste a prompt pill.

1. Click Copy prompt (or Show the prompt to read it first).
2. Paste it into the tool you build your site with and make the change.
3. Click I made this change. You see "Marked done. Ivy Link checks the change on your site and measures what it does." The card moves to Shipped right away.

6. Merged and live

For a pull request, a merge isn't the finish line. Ivy Link marks the work Shipped once it confirms the change is live on your site, not when the pull request merges. If a pull request is closed without merging, the work goes back to where it was before.

Shipped work moves to Done on Results.

7. Measured at day 7 and day 28 (free)

Pip measures each shipped change against the page or search it was tied to: once 7 days after it ships, and again at 28 days. Measuring is free and keeps going even if you turn your agents off.

The result appears on Agents and under Done lately on Home. For a search, it reads like this: the search, how many days after the fix, clicks a week now and before, the position change, and a verdict. For a page, it says whether the checks still see problems on it.

From 14 days after a change ships, an agent can record how it did, with the numbers before and after. Its card on Results then shows Measured. These are before-and-after numbers. They show what changed, not proof that the change caused it, and no change is guaranteed to move your rankings.

8. Reported weekly (free)

Each week, Ivy Link writes a report of the last completed Monday to Sunday (UTC): your search numbers, the work agents did, pull requests opened and merged, and data collection. Writing it doesn't spend credits.

Weekly reports live at Weekly reports. Each report is a snapshot. It doesn't change when later data arrives. Missing data shows as unknown, not zero.

By default, Ivy Link reviews each report before it appears there and is emailed to you (After Ivy Link review). To get future reports as soon as they're ready, set Send weekly reports to Automatically each week and click Save delivery. You need a verified sign-in email to change this. See Weekly reports.

What costs credits

Your plan sets how fast agents may spend. Your balance caps what they can spend. See Budgets and Credits.

Where to follow along

• Home: what's running now, what needs you, the coming week and what got done.
• Agents: every agent's messages, newest first, with why any work is waiting.
• Approvals: ideas waiting for your OK.
• Results: approved work, pull requests and prompts.

Questions? Email hello@ivyl.ink.

Last updated October 31, 2026

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