Understanding Your Alerts

What Is on the Alerts Screen

The daily page check is part of Pro. On Essentials, Alerts shows a short note in place of everything below — “Daily page checks and their alerts are part of Pro. Upgrade on the Billing page to add them.” — with a See plans link, and the page check does not run. The ranking-change emails further down this article come with both plans.

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.

What a Quiet Inbox Means

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. It covers your homepage and up to 25 pages you nominate, 26 pages at most, and makes the eight checks listed below. On a day when it finds nothing new, it sends no alert.

So a quiet inbox is not a clean bill of health. It says nothing about pages the check does not read or problems it does not look for, and the Alerts screen shows when the last check ran, what it saw and anything it could not check.

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 nothing is, it names the day of the last finished check, the pages it read and the checks it ran.

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.

Each run starts by asking for your site’s robots.txt. If your server answers that request with a server error, or doesn’t answer it in time, search engines take that as a reason to stop reading your site, so the check reads none of your pages that day either. It raises an alert saying so, and the board shows Crawlers allowed as a problem and your pages in amber. The alert is marked Fixed once your server answers that request properly again.

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.

Ranking Changes

On both plans, we also email you when one of your tracked keywords crosses into or out of the top 3, the top 10 or the top 100. Rankings are checked every week, and a crossing has to hold for two weekly checks in a row before we write, so a one-week wobble on a boundary never reaches your inbox. A week when Google showed fewer than 100 results and your site wasn’t among them doesn’t count either way, because it can’t tell us whether you moved. You can switch these off under Ranking changes in Email Preferences; the positions stay on the Rankings screen either way.

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.