Understanding Your Alerts

What Is on the Alerts Screen

Open Alerts from the menu down the left of your dashboard. One line at the top gives the verdict — either how many alerts are open, or All clear with the date and time we last looked. Under it the screen is four blocks, in this order down the page:

1. Alert Log. Everything we have raised about your site, whatever state each one is in now.
2. What We Checked. Every check against every page, as of the last run.
3. What Each Check Means. A plain sentence for each of the checks named across the top of the board above it.
4. Canary Pages. The pages being checked, where you add and remove them — covered in Choosing Your Canary Pages.

The middle two appear once there has been a run to report. Until then the screen is the verdict line, the Alert Log and your Canary Pages.

No Email Means Nothing Broke

The daily check — the software we call the canary — runs once a day, at the same time each day, whether or not anything is wrong. When it finds nothing, it does not write. An inbox with no alerts in it is a site with nothing wrong, not a feature that has stopped.

If you would rather have proof of life on a schedule, keep the weekly summary switched on under Settings. It lists anything still open and when the last check ran, whether or not there is bad news.

What the Daily Check Looks For

It is looking for the handful of changes that quietly cost you customers — the ones that do not announce themselves and that nobody notices for weeks. These are asked of each of your Canary Pages:

Page responds

The page still loads when we ask for it, rather than erroring or timing out.

Still indexable

Nothing on the page has started telling search engines to leave it out of their results.

Allowed in robots.txt

Your site publishes a small instructions file for search engines, called robots.txt, and it still lets them fetch this page.

Canonical unchanged

The page still names the same preferred address — the one it tells search engines to treat as the real one when the same content sits at more than one web address.

Title unchanged

The headline people read in search results is still the one you wrote.

And these once, about the site as a whole:

Crawlers allowed

The automated readers search engines and AI tools send out can still get in.

Certificate valid

The security certificate behind the padlock in the address bar is still valid, so no browser warns visitors away from you.

Sitemap reachable

The list of your pages that you publish for search engines, called a sitemap, still loads.

It covers your homepage by default, plus up to 25 pages you nominate — choosing your Canary Pages.

What an Alert Email Says

One email per run, covering everything new that run found: what changed, what it costs you, and the likeliest cause. It reaches you while the fix is still easy, which is the whole value of a daily check over a monthly one.

When something you were alerted about goes back to normal, you get a short note saying so. You are never left wondering whether an old alert still applies.

The Status Board

The Alerts screen shows more than the alerts themselves. What We Checked is the full board — every Canary Page against every check — with the date and time of the last run above it. It is a record of what was seen then, not a live view.

A cell we could not fill is shown in amber with its reason. It is never drawn as a tick, and the screen says out loud when today’s run has not happened yet: a board from yesterday, shown without a date, is false reassurance in a different shape.

What Each Word in the Status Column Means

Every row of the Alert Log carries one word in its Status column, and there are four of them. Open ones are listed first.

Open

Something is wrong now, and it was still wrong at the last check.

Noticed

Something changed that we recorded rather than judged — a page title rewritten, or a page now telling search engines that a different address is the main one. There is no broken state to fix, so it is never shown as open waiting for a resolution that cannot come.

Fixed

It was wrong, and at a later check it was not. We tell you when this happens rather than letting you find out.

No longer watched

It was still wrong when its page came off your Canary Pages. Nobody saw it put right, and nobody is looking at it any more.

What the Daily Check Does Not Watch

The daily check is not a service that tells you the minute your site goes down. We look once a day, so a site that failed for two hours this afternoon and came back is something we never see at all. If you need to know within minutes, that is a different kind of product and you should buy one.

What this catches is the other failure — the one that lasts, that nobody notices, and that quietly removes you from search results while your site looks perfectly fine to anybody who visits it.