Get started

You need an account and your site's address, such as example.com.

1. On the front page, type your site's address and press Start free.
2. Create your account. Free needs no card.
3. Open the email we send you and confirm your address. We then add the site to your account and start checking it.

Already signed in? On the Sites page, press Add a site, type the address and press Add site. While you have no site yet, the field is already there, under Check your first site.

A site covers its www and non-www addresses together, so add it once. Every site counts toward your plan from the moment you add it, verified or not. Plans says how many sites each plan watches.

Within seconds we run a quick check of what search engines read first: robots.txt, the homepage and the sitemap. It shows on the site's overview as Quick check.

If the homepage answers, the first crawl starts on its own. A crawl means we read the site's pages, as a search engine's crawler does, and check each one against every rule. Until you show the site is yours, a crawl reads up to 50 pages.

If the quick check can't reach the site, or robots.txt keeps our crawler out, the first crawl doesn't start. The overview says what went wrong and what to do next.

When the crawl ends, the overview fills in. From the top:

• The verdict is one sentence for the state of the site, such as "2 critical issues to fix now", "3 errors to fix" or "Everything we check passed". Under it: what changed since the crawl before, and how many pages we checked.
• The counts line gives the open issues by severity: critical, errors and warnings. Each one opens the Issues tab at that severity. The line under it counts suggestions and the things we watch.
• Fix first lists the issues to fix first, ranked by severity, how sure we are, how much the pages matter and how many pages are affected. "Why first?" on each one says why it is there, and All issues opens the full list.

An issue is something on your pages that can stop search engines crawling or indexing them as you mean. Severity is about that, not a prediction of rankings. Work through issues says what each severity means and how to tell us something is fixed.

Until the setup is done, the overview starts with Finish setting up: the steps left, each with a link to the place in the site's settings where it is done. Team owners and admins see it, since they are the ones who can change a site's settings.

1. Prove it's yours. Needed before we monitor the site. Show the site is yours explains the ways to do it.
2. Choose who gets alerts. Needed too: who hears from us when something stops pages being crawled or indexed, by email, Slack or a webhook. Choose who gets alerts says how.
3. Connect Google Search Console. Optional. It shows what Google itself reports about your pages, and can prove the site is yours at the same time. Connect Google Search Console walks through it.
4. Check every deploy. Optional, and a job for your developer: one step in your deploy pipeline, and we check the site 30 seconds after each deploy. Check every deploy has examples.

The list goes away once the site is verified and its alerts have somewhere to go. The optional steps wait in the site's settings for whenever you want them.

We monitor a site only once its owner has shown it is theirs. Until then it gets one crawl a day, of up to 50 pages, the same on every plan. There is no schedule, no check of your key pages after a deploy or each day, no alerts, no weekly digest and no rechecks of fixes.

Verifying opens the rest:

• crawls at your plan's size whenever you ask, within the month's page allowance;
• a full crawl every week on its own, unless you choose another schedule;
• a check of your key pages, and of what changed, after a deploy and once a day;
• an alert when something stops a page being crawled or indexed;
• a recheck of the pages a fix touched, so you know it worked.

In the setup steps, What verifying opens lists these with your plan's numbers. Plans has them side by side.

Every site has four tabs: Overview · Issues · History · Settings.

• Overview: the verdict, Fix first and the setup steps.
• Issues: every open issue, with the suggestions and what we watch.
• History: each crawl, and what changed between them.
• Settings, in four tabs of its own. Setup has the site's ownership, its name, how often to crawl it and its key pages. Alerts says where alerts go. Connections holds Google Search Console and the check after a deploy. Advanced has which addresses and pages a crawl covers, hidden issues, and deleting the site.

The menu under your name holds Your account, for your profile, security and coding agents, and Team settings, for the team's plan and members. These guides are there too.