Core Concepts
What environment, lead, Vault, agent, agent action, artifact, segment and profile mean in Surface.
Environment
The boundary everything else sits inside. A workspace can hold several
environments (production, staging, one per brand or region), and
everything else belongs to exactly one of them: leads, forms, the Vault,
integrations, API keys.
An API key or OAuth connection belongs to one environment, so an MCP tool call
can never reach another one. ?tools= changes which tools your assistant
loads, never which data it may touch. See
Tool bundles.
Lead
One person, one record, in the Lead Data Layer. Surface creates it the first time it can attach an identity to activity: a form completion, a webhook, an import. Later activity adds to the record instead of replacing it.
A response is one submission of one form, and a lead may have many. Completion rate counts responses; pipeline counts leads.
Vault
The environment's private Markdown knowledge base: positioning, product facts, customer proof, competitor notes, voice. Agents read it before they write. One crawl of your website starts a Vault.
Agent
A named worker with a job, a trigger, and something it writes to. Surface has four families:
| Family | Reads | Writes | Runs when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead Agents | Lead record, web | Lead fields, score | On capture, and on demand |
| Campaign Agents | Vault, leads, CRM, web | Drafts, artifacts, CMS entries | On demand, on a schedule |
| System Agents | Lead record, CRM | Your CRM and MAP | On change |
| SAM | Forms, responses, leads, analytics, workflows, scores, the Vault, and whatever else its enabled capabilities cover | Content and drafts, behind an Approve card. Background jobs are read-only | When you ask, or on a schedule |
Agent Action
The metered unit of agent work. Your plan is sized in agent actions.
| Included per month | 15,000 on Agentic Marketing Operations. Custom above that, none on Basic |
| Beyond the included volume | $0.20 per action |
The pricing page has the current numbers.
What counts as one action is decided per agent. Check your usage in the app, or ask us, before you plan around a specific number.
Artifact
Something an agent produced that a person can review, edit, approve and publish: a draft post, a comparison page, a generated image. Artifacts keep version history.
Segment
A saved, live query over leads: "ICP fit ≥ 70, visited pricing in the last 14 days, no meeting booked". Campaigns target segments and agents run against them. Membership updates as records change, so a segment is never a frozen list.
Profile
What an AI Visibility scan runs against: one domain, its positioning, its competitor set, and the prompts you track against it. Scores, cited sources and per-model breakdowns attach to the profile.
Two words these docs avoid: "contact" (your CRM's object, which Surface syncs to rather than owns) and "campaign" meaning a channel. A Surface campaign is a plan with an audience, an outcome and measurement, see Campaign Agents.