Monitor site settings

Each site in Monitor has its own settings on its Settings tab, in five sub-tabs: Checks, Thresholds, Alerts, Reporting and Crawling & extraction. Below them, whichever sub-tab is open, Stop watching this site lets you pause or remove the site.

Before you start: Monitor must be enabled for your workspace. It is set up by arrangement, so if you do not see the Monitor icon in the top bar, contact us. You need access to the site to change its settings, and removing a site needs a workspace owner or admin, or a project admin when the site belongs to a project.

What is not a setting

Monitor decides these for you, so you will not find them in settings:

Which pages to check. Monitor watches the whole site at the address you added. It finds pages from your sitemaps and internal links, and obeys robots.txt. To stop hearing about a group of pages, such as tag archives, stop reporting findings for a segment. See Issues and severity.
Where your sitemap is. Monitor reads the sitemaps listed in robots.txt, and when robots.txt lists none it also tries /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml. If yours is elsewhere, add a Sitemap: line with its full URL to robots.txt.
How often pages are checked. Each page is re-checked every 15 minutes to every 24 hours, depending on its importance.
How many pages are tracked. The site’s page limit is shown on Overview next to Pages tracked, for example “of 5,000”. It cannot be changed in settings.
Pages behind a login. These are not supported.

Checks

Switch checks on or off and change their severity.

Section	What it holds
Per-page checks	Checks evaluated on every page, every time it is checked
Whole-site checks	Checks that need the entire site, such as duplicates, broken internal links and orphan pages
Switched off for a segment	Checks you stopped reporting for a segment. Remove one to bring the check back for those pages

For each check, clear its checkbox to switch it off for the whole site, or choose critical, warning or info to change its severity. See Issues and severity.

Thresholds

The numbers that length and content checks compare against. Choose The whole site, or a segment to give its pages different numbers. In a segment, anything left blank follows the site. Where two segments cover one page, the more permissive number wins.

First choose how title and meta description length is measured: Pixels, which matches how search results truncate, or Characters. The fields you see depend on that choice.

Field	Used for
Title, minimum width (px) / Title, maximum width (px)	Title length, in pixels
Meta description, minimum width (px) / Meta description, maximum width (px)	Meta description length, in pixels
Title, minimum characters / Title, maximum characters	Title length, in characters
Meta description, minimum / Meta description, maximum	Meta description length, in characters
H1, minimum characters / H1, maximum characters	H1 length
Thin content, word count	Pages with fewer words are reported as thin
Minimum internal links	Pages linking to less of the site than this are reported

Select Save thresholds, or the save button for the segment, to apply them.

Alerts

Who is emailed, about what, and when: alert rules, their sensitivity, recipients and Slack. See Alerts and incidents for each setting and the defaults.

Reporting

Connect Google data so Monitor can show what each page ranks for and whether a change moved its traffic. Under Search Console & Analytics:

Google account: choose a connected account, or Connect a Google account.
Search Console property: the property that covers this site, either a domain property (sc-domain:example.com) or a URL prefix (https://example.com/).
GA4 property: the Analytics property that measures this site. If you enter it by hand, use the numeric property ID, not the measurement ID.

If a property is not in the list, select Enter an identifier manually. Select Save when you are done.

Crawling & extraction

Setting	What it does
Render pages with a browser	On by default. Fetches each page twice, plainly and in a browser, and compares them. This finds titles, canonicals and content that only exist after JavaScript runs, and catches console errors: blocked requests, uncaught exceptions and resources that failed to load. Turning it off removes all of those findings. Consider it only for a genuinely static site
Custom elements	CSS selectors that pull a value off every page, such as a price or a published date. For each, set a Label, Key, Selector and what to Read: Text, Number, Attribute or HTML. Changes show up on the Changes tab and in alerts. Select Add element, then Save elements
IndexNow	Submit changed URLs automatically sends changed, indexable pages to Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver, batched every half hour. Google does not use IndexNow. You must publish the key file Monitor shows on your own domain. Submit now sends immediately
Politeness	Minimum gap between requests, from 0 to 5,000 ms in steps of 250 ms. The default is 500 ms. It is enforced per host, so several sites on one server share one limit
Pause crawling	Stops all fetching immediately. Everything already recorded stays readable
Setting	What it does
Render pages with a browser	On by default. Fetches each page twice, plainly and in a browser, and compares them. This finds titles, canonicals and content that only exist after JavaScript runs, and catches console errors: blocked requests, uncaught exceptions and resources that failed to load. Turning it off removes all of those findings. Consider it only for a genuinely static site
Custom elements	CSS selectors that pull a value off every page, such as a price or a published date. For each, set a Label, Key, Selector and what to Read: Text, Number, Attribute or HTML. Changes show up on the Changes tab and in alerts. Select Add element, then Save elements
IndexNow	Submit changed URLs automatically sends changed, indexable pages to Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver, batched every half hour. Google does not use IndexNow. You must publish the key file Monitor shows on your own domain. Submit now sends immediately
Politeness	Minimum gap between requests, from 0 to 5,000 ms in steps of 250 ms. It is enforced per host, so several sites on one server share one limit
Pause crawling	Stops all fetching immediately. Everything already recorded stays readable

If your server answers with a rate-limit response, Monitor slows down on its own. This card then shows “This host asked us to slow down” and when crawling resumes.

Stop watching this site

You can pause a site or remove it.

Pause monitoring stops all fetching and keeps every page, change and incident. Select Resume monitoring to continue where it left off. This is the same as Pause crawling.
Remove site deletes the site from Monitor.

Warning: Removing a site cannot be undone. It deletes the site and everything recorded about it: its pages, recorded changes and incidents. Open incidents are closed without an all-clear, so nobody is told they cleared. Pause the site instead if you might come back to it.

To remove a site:

Check how many pages, recorded changes and incidents Monitor says will be deleted, then select Remove site.
Type the site’s host name to confirm, for example example.com.
Select Remove permanently.

The site stops counting towards what your workspace is billed for. Only a workspace owner or admin can remove a site, or a project admin when the site belongs to a project. Other members see a note saying so and can still pause it.