In short
- Site watch rechecks verified sites weekly on Free and daily on Builder and Pro, with no credits.
- Each check covers robots.txt, the sitemap, key pages, weekly Core Web Vitals and, with Search Console, indexing.
- Alerts fire only for regressions on pages that were healthy, and at most one alert email goes out per site per day.
- The weekly email arrives on Monday morning in your timezone and is skipped when nothing happened.
A site that's fine today can break with the next deploy: a stray noindex, a broken sitemap, a redirect loop. Site watch is Serpkin's regular recheck of your verified sites. It looks for regressions, sends an alert when something breaks, records early wins, and rolls it all into a weekly email. It uses no credits and runs on its own once your site is verified.
How often it checks
| Plan | How often | Key pages per check |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Weekly | Up to 10 |
| Builder ($29 a month) | Daily | Up to 20 |
| Pro ($79 a month) | Daily | Up to 25 |
Only verified sites are watched: prove ownership with Search Console or the verification file first (see Getting started). Checks run in a fixed time slot per site, so they spread out over the day or week, and they respect your robots.txt crawl delay, waiting at least one second between requests.
What each check looks at
- robots.txt, to catch new rules that block public pages.
- Your sitemap, plus at most one child sitemap, including a few newly listed URLs.
- Key pages: the homepage, pages from your missions, your top Search Console pages and your most-linked pages.
- Core Web Vitals, at most once a week: the homepage and two key pages.
- Indexing, with Search Console connected: a few URL inspections per check, for new sitemap URLs and pages changed by verified missions.
Site watch is a light check, not a full scan. The deep crawl, with every page, the link graph and probes, runs when you or your agent start a scan. That keeps the watch fast and cheap enough to run daily.
Alerts
Alerts are conservative: a page only raises one if it was healthy in the previous check. The homepage has to be unreachable in two checks in a row, about 30 minutes apart, before Serpkin calls the site down.
| Alert | When | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Site unreachable | The homepage didn't respond in two checks in a row | Check your hosting and the latest deploy |
| Page errors | A page that worked now returns an error | Restore it, or redirect it permanently to its replacement and update links |
| Page hidden from search | A page gained noindex | Remove the noindex if the page should appear in search |
| Canonical changed | A page's canonical no longer points to itself | Point it back to the page's own absolute URL, unless intended |
| Sitemap broken | The sitemap stopped returning valid XML | Make sure it returns valid sitemap XML with HTTP 200 |
| robots.txt blocking pages | A new Disallow rule blocks public pages | Remove the rule that blocks them |
| Keyword left the top 10 | A tracked keyword dropped out of the top 10 after holding it | Open the related mission, if there is one |
| Page got slower | Core Web Vitals regressed on a key page | Check what changed in the latest deploy |
| Strong backlink lost | A strong site stopped linking to you | See the backlinks view for the page and the link |
How alert emails are sent
- 1DetectedA check finds a regression and records an alert on the site.
- 2BatchedThe first alert waits about 10 minutes, so related ones arrive together.
- 3SentAt most one alert email per site per 24 hours.
- 4ResolvedWhen a later check finds the page healthy again, the alert closes on its own.
Alerts older than 48 hours that haven't been emailed are left to the weekly email instead. You can turn alert emails off in your account preferences, or with the unsubscribe link in any alert.
Early wins
Search results take time, so Site watch also records early progress before traffic shows up: a page indexed, first impressions in search, a first ranking in the top 100, a keyword entering the top 10 or reaching page one, clicks going up, and missions verified. Wins appear on the Results page and in the weekly email; they don't send alerts.
The weekly email
Every Monday from 08:00 in your timezone (UTC if Serpkin doesn't know it), you get one email per account with what changed on your verified sites: alerts, wins, verified missions, clicks when Search Console is connected, and your next mission. If nothing happened and there's no next mission, Serpkin skips the email rather than sending an empty one.
Numbers in the email only appear when they're measured, such as Search Console clicks or tracked keyword positions; nothing is estimated. For how missions are checked and measured, see Verification and results. What your competitors publish is tracked separately by Competitor watch, on its own weekly schedule.
Questions
Why isn't my site being watched?
Site watch covers verified sites only. Prove ownership with Search Console or the verification file, then the first check runs on its own.
Does site watch use credits?
No. Site watch, its alerts and the weekly email are included on every plan and never use credits.