## **📋 Overview of Universal Credits**

Universal Credits (UC) are the shared resource pool that powers AI-driven features across Search Atlas — including bulk content optimizations, OTTO SEO tasks, and other automated workflows. Every action that consumes processing resources draws from this pool, so understanding how credits are spent helps you plan usage and avoid unexpected depletion.

## **📊 How Credit Consumption Is Calculated**

Credits are consumed at the feature level and tracked per billing cycle. The main activities that draw from your Universal Credit balance include:

- **Bulk optimization runs** — running content optimizations across multiple pages simultaneously consumes credits proportional to the number of pages and complexity of each task.
- **OTTO SEO automated tasks** — each task OTTO executes (meta updates, schema changes, redirects, etc.) deducts a set amount from your balance.
- **AI-assisted content generation** — generating or rewriting content via AI tools uses token-based micro-transactions that accumulate throughout the cycle.
- **Guided onboarding workflows** — some onboarding steps trigger automated actions that consume a small number of credits during initial setup.

Credits are aggregated per feature and per billing cycle, meaning your usage is grouped by the type of action performed, not listed as individual atomic transactions in the customer-facing view.

## **🔎 Where to View Your Credit Usage**

To review your current Universal Credit balance and cycle-level consumption breakdown, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Search Atlas account.
2. Click your avatar in the top-right corner.
3. Select **Billing** to open the Billing page.
4. Open the **Activity Log** tab to see your usage for the current billing cycle.

The usage summary shows credit consumption grouped by feature category (for example, Bulk Optimization, OTTO Tasks, Content AI). This gives you a high-level view of where your credits are going each cycle.

## **⚠️ Why Your Balance May Look Unexpected**

There are a few known factors that can make your credit balance harder to interpret:

- **Bulk actions multiply consumption** — selecting a large batch of pages for optimization can deplete credits faster than expected because each page is processed individually in the background.
- **Onboarding automation** — if you recently set up your account and went through guided onboarding, some credits may have been used automatically during that process without an explicit prompt.
- **Plan changes mid-cycle** — if your plan was changed during an active billing cycle, your credit allocation or reset behavior may not reflect what you expect. Our team is actively working on improvements to how credits reset during plan changes initiated at checkout.
- **Audit log gaps** — we are aware that a past technical issue affected the completeness of some usage audit records. Our engineering team has resolved the underlying problem, but some historical events from earlier cycles may not appear in detailed logs. This does not affect your current balance accuracy.

## **💡 Tips to Manage Your Credit Balance**

- Run bulk optimizations in smaller batches to pace your credit consumption and monitor the impact before scaling up.
- Review your OTTO SEO task queue regularly and disable automated tasks you no longer need.
- Check your credit balance before starting large projects so you can estimate whether your current allocation is sufficient.
- If you are approaching your limit, consider upgrading your plan or purchasing additional credits before running high-volume workflows.

## **🛠️ Requesting a Detailed Credit Audit**

If the usage summary in your dashboard does not give you enough detail to explain a specific depletion event, our support team can pull a cycle-scoped, per-feature consumption report from the backend for your account. This report provides a more granular breakdown than what is currently visible in the self-serve dashboard.

To request an audit, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team. Please have the following ready to share:

- The approximate date or date range when you noticed the credit drop.
- Any specific features or projects you were working on at the time.
- Your current plan name and billing cycle start date.

Having this information ready will help our team locate the relevant usage data quickly and provide you with a clear itemized breakdown.

## **🚀 What We Are Improving**

We are actively working on enhancements to make Universal Credit usage more transparent for all customers. Upcoming improvements include:

- More granular, self-serve usage logs visible directly in the dashboard.
- Clearer credit usage explanations during guided onboarding so you know what is happening at each step.
- Fixes to ensure credit balances reset correctly when plans are changed at checkout.

These updates will roll out progressively — we appreciate your patience as we improve the experience.

## **💬 Still Have Questions?**

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team.