# Adding a site to Monitor

Putting a site under watch, and making sense of the first crawl.

## Adding it

Monitor → add a site → give it the URL you want crawled from, usually your homepage.

Monitor discovers pages by following links from there and by reading your sitemap if you have one. A sitemap is worth having: without it, pages nothing links to are invisible to a crawler, which is itself worth knowing.

## Scope

Decide what is in and what is out before the first full crawl, because scope drives both the noise and the cost.

- **Include** the pages that matter — your content, your landing pages, your documentation.
- **Exclude** the ones that will never be interesting: paginated archives running to hundreds of pages, tag pages, search results, anything behind a login.

Excluding is not hiding a problem. A tag archive with a thin-content warning is not a finding, it is the nature of tag archives, and leaving hundreds of them in the report buries the things that are real.

## Frequency

More often is not better. The right cadence is roughly how quickly you would want to know:

- A **marketing site that changes weekly** — daily is plenty.
- A **documentation site under active edit** — daily, and it will catch same-day mistakes.
- A **large site with a slow publishing cycle** — weekly on the bulk, more often on the pages that matter.

## The first crawl

Treat it as a **baseline**, not a to-do list. It will surface things that have been true for years and are not urgent, and it has nothing to compare against yet.

Read it once to spot anything genuinely alarming — a page returning the wrong status, a `noindex` you did not know about — then let the second crawl do the real work. From then on you are looking at *changes*, which is where the signal is.

## Who gets told

Set the alert recipients when you add the site. See [alerts and incidents](/docs/alerts-and-incidents) — one problem is one alert however many pages it touches, which is the part that decides whether the alerts stay readable.

## Related

- [What Monitor does](/docs/monitor-overview)
- [Pages and crawl activity](/docs/pages-and-crawl-activity)
- [Monitor settings](/docs/monitor-settings)