Automate
Turn a recurring action into a rule that runs itself. The bridge between Actions and Workflows: when a signal you've seen before lands again, Trakkr handles it without putting it back in your queue.
- What Automate is, and how it sits between Actions and Workflows
- The rule lifecycle: trigger, filter, action, log
- What you can put on autopilot today
- How approvals, test runs, and the audit trail keep automation safe
- When to reach for Automate, and when to open the full Workflows editor
There are three concepts on Trakkr that look like the same thing and aren't. Actions is the list of things you should do. Automate is how you take one of those things off your plate forever. Workflows is the full builder underneath, where the more ambitious automation lives. People confuse the three constantly, so a short, sharp distinction first.
Actions, Automate, Workflows: the trio
The shortest version: Actions is judgment, Automate is repetition, Workflows is design.
Read the table top to bottom and a pattern emerges. Actions is the surface where Trakkr puts judgment calls in front of you. Automate is the shortcut for the moment you realize you've made the same judgment call three times in a row. Workflows is what Automate quietly creates for you, plus everything else the engine can do.
The reason Automate exists as a separate thing, instead of just sending you to the Workflows editor, is that the editor is overkill for the most common case. Most rules people want look like "when this kind of action shows up again, ping me on Slack." Two clicks from the action card, not five tabs of trigger config.
Where the Automate button lives
Open any action card and you'll find Automate… in the action menu (or hit W). It opens a small modal with three rows of choices: When, Matching, Then. The modal is primed with the filters that match the action you opened, so the first state is usually correct on its own.
The three rows decide the rule:
| Row | What it picks |
|---|---|
| When | The event that fires the rule. Either New action created or Action completed. |
| Matching | The filter the action has to satisfy. Category, impact, and priority chips, pre-filled from the source action. |
| Then | The single notification you want to send. Email, Slack, webhook, task, or sheet. |
Click Create workflow and the rule is live. It's stored as a normal workflow under the hood, which means you can open it later in the Workflows editor to add more steps, change the trigger, or add conditions. Automate is just the fast path in.
The rule lifecycle
Every rule moves through the same five steps. Knowing this loop is enough to debug almost anything.
A few things worth knowing about the loop:
- The action still appears in your queue. Automate doesn't suppress the action card. It runs alongside it, so you can still review and act manually if you want. If you'd rather the queue stop showing a class of action entirely, that's a feature request for the Actions filters, not Automate.
- One signal, many rules. A single action can trigger several rules. If you have a Slack rule and an email rule and both filters match, both fire.
- Idempotent by source. Actions carry a
source_refso the same underlying signal doesn't re-emit on every report. A rule fires once per distinct action, not once per report.
What you can put on autopilot today
The Automate modal exposes a deliberately narrow surface: the actions that work as instant notifications. Anything more involved (content generation, CMS publishing, multi-step approvals) lives in the Workflows editor.
Triggers Automate supports.
| Trigger | When it fires |
|---|---|
action_created | A new action lands in your queue, from the synthesizer, an emitter, or manually |
action_completed | An action is marked done, from the UI or from a Trakkr-executed flow |
Filters you can layer on. All optional, all stackable.
- Category: content, technical, citation, competitive, optimization, reddit, diagnose, setup, and so on. The chips match the action categories exactly.
- Impact: high, medium, or any. Useful for routing the big ones to a different channel than the small ones.
- Priority level:
quick-win,high-roi, or any. Most teams set the Slack rule onquick-winand an email digest on everything else.
Actions you can fire.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sends to the recipients you list, with a one-line summary of the matching action. Supports digesting at instant, 15-minute, hourly, or daily intervals. | |
| Slack | Posts to a channel via your connected workspace. Includes the action title, category, and a deep link back into Trakkr. |
| Webhook | POSTs the action payload to any URL. Used by teams routing into PagerDuty, Linear, Jira, or custom internal tools. |
| Task | Creates a task in your connected task system (Linear, Notion, ClickUp). |
| Sheet | Appends a row to a connected Google Sheet, one column per field. |
If you want more than this, like generating an article, pushing a CMS change, or triggering a multi-step approval, you're in Workflows territory. Open the rule in the Workflows editor and add the steps you need.
Approvals, dry runs, and the audit trail
Three things keep automation honest: a preview mode before you go live, an optional approval step before destructive sends, and a per-run log of everything that happened.
Test before live. Every workflow has a Test button. The default is preview mode: Trakkr evaluates the trigger against a sample event, shows you which rows would match, and renders what each action would do, without actually sending anything. Switch to live mode when you want to fire a real test send to yourself. Live mode is rate-limited to 5 per minute per workflow.
Approve before send. For the higher-trust action types (publishing to a site, posting to Reddit, sending outbound email through Trakkr's own infrastructure), the workflow can route through an approval surface in Slack first. The teammate who owns the channel sees the draft, hits approve or reject, and only then does it go out. Approvals are configured per destination in the Workflows editor, not in the Automate modal.
Audit everything. Every workflow run is logged. The Workflows page shows recent runs, what triggered each one, which actions executed, and what came back. For automation that pushes changes to your CMS or external systems, the run log is the source of truth for "did this actually happen?"
When to use Automate vs Workflows
The right question isn't "which is better," it's "is the trigger an action, and is the response a single notification?" If both answers are yes, use Automate. Otherwise, open Workflows.
| Use Automate when | Use Workflows when |
|---|---|
| The trigger is a new or completed action | The trigger is a visibility change, citation event, crawler signal, or schedule |
| You want a single notification (email, Slack, webhook, task, sheet) | You want a sequence: generate, then approve, then publish |
| The filter is "this kind of action" | The filter needs custom conditions or branching |
| You're inside the Actions page and don't want to context-switch | You're designing a system, not reacting to one |
Worth knowing: an Automate rule and a Workflows rule are the same record. If you start in Automate and outgrow it later, you don't migrate, you just keep editing the same workflow. Click through to the rule from the Workflows list and the full editor opens with everything Automate set up already there.
Common questions
Does turning on Automate remove the action from my queue?
No. The action still appears so you can review it. Automate runs the notification alongside, it doesn't suppress the card. If you want to filter a category out of view entirely, that's an Actions filter, not an Automate behavior.
Can one action trigger multiple rules?
Yes. Trakkr evaluates every workflow with a matching trigger and runs all of them whose filters match. Setting two Slack rules on overlapping filters will send two messages.
What if the rule keeps firing too often?
Three knobs. Tighten the Matching filter (impact: high, priority: quick-win). Switch the email action to digest mode so multiple matches batch into one send. Or change the trigger from action_created to action_completed, which fires far less often.
Can I edit an Automate rule later?
Yes, in the Workflows editor. Open Workflows, find the rule by the name Automate generated, and you get the full editor: change the trigger, add filters, add steps, add approvals.
Do Automate rules count against my workflow limit?
Yes. Each rule is a workflow, and Free has 0 workflow slots, Growth has 3, Scale is unlimited. If you're hitting the cap, audit the Workflows list before creating more.
Why didn't my rule fire when I expected it to?
Open the workflow's run log. The most common causes are filter mismatches (the action's actual category was different from what you expected), an unpublished destination (Slack channel removed, webhook URL 4xx'd), or the action being suppressed upstream because it duplicated an existing one.
How do I send to multiple destinations?
Two ways. Either create one Automate rule per destination (simplest, easiest to reason about), or open the rule in Workflows and add additional action steps. The first is usually cleaner.
Workflows
Open the full editor when the trigger isn't an action, or when you need branching, approvals, or multi-step flows.
Workflow Templates
Pre-built rules for the most common patterns: competitor alerts, visibility drops, weekly summaries.
Actions
The queue Automate runs against. Read this if you're not sure what "an action" actually is.