Site watch: a daily look at your own site between checks

What it does

A check shows which pages of your site the assistants read on the day it ran. The site watch keeps an eye on those pages between checks. Once a day PollyX opens your homepage, the pages of your site the assistants read in your newest check and your main pages from your sitemap, up to 20 pages, and compares each with what it saw at the look before.

It reads your pages and nothing else. No assistant is asked and no AI is used, so the watch uses no credit and no plan check.

Turn it on

1. 1Open the brand's brand hub and choose Your website. From a check, Open the site watch under What reached your website takes you there.
2. 2In the Site watch card, choose Watch my site. The first look usually takes under a minute and records how your pages are today. On a site whose list of pages is slow to read, the card lists your pages first and the first look follows within the hour. Changes are reported from the next look on.

You can run up to 5 watches at a time, one per brand and market. Look now takes an extra look, up to 3 times a day, and lists what it finds in the card straight away, without an email. Stop watching ends the watch and keeps its history.

What you are told about

Important changes go to the bell in your dashboard and to your email, in one message per look:

• A page stopped working: it answers "not found", says it was not found, or sends visitors to your homepage instead. An assistant that links a buyer there sends them to a dead end.
• A page is closed to search engines: it now carries a noindex instruction, or a nosnippet instruction, which keeps its text out of Google's AI answers.
• Your robots.txt keeps an assistant's reader out of a watched page, or cannot be read at all, which crawlers that follow the rules treat as the whole site being closed.
• A page is nearly empty without JavaScript. Most AI page readers do not run JavaScript, so that is close to all they see.
• A page names another website as the real page in its canonical link, which is nearly always a leftover from a redesign.

Everything else is listed in the card without an email: a changed title, main heading or description (with the old and the new wording), a page that now redirects, a page that now forwards to an address PollyXBot may not open, structured data that went missing, a page with much less text, a checklist score that fell by 10 points or more, new rules for the crawlers that collect training data, a page that turns PollyXBot away, and pages that work again. Tick Email me about every change, not only the important ones to get those by email too.

If you send alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook, the same message goes there, after the daily look and after Look now alike: see Sending alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook.

A daily look, not an uptime monitor

Each page is opened once a day. A "not found" is reported at once. A server error, or no answer at all, is reported only when it happens two looks in a row, so one bad minute a day is not news. A site that is down for an hour at another time of day goes unseen: for that you need an uptime monitor.

How it reads your site

As PollyXBot, the page as your server sends it and without running JavaScript, and only where your robots.txt allows PollyXBot. When a page forwards to another address, PollyXBot follows only if the robots.txt of that address allows it, on your site or on any other. A page your robots.txt closes to PollyXBot, or one that forwards to an address closed to it, cannot be watched, and the card says so.

When it pauses

The watch follows your newest check on the brand. When that check is more than 90 days old, the pages it follows are out of date and the watch pauses. Your next check starts it again, with the pages the assistants read then.