Key takeaways
- Technical health regresses with every change. Audit continuously, not once a year.
- Alert on what needs action: a score drop beyond a threshold, a new critical failure, the site becoming unreachable.
- Send alerts where the team already looks, such as Slack or email, and keep them rare.
- Keep the history, so you can tie a regression to the release that caused it.
On this page
Why sites regress
A site that passed every check last month can fail today without anyone touching SEO:
- A deploy ships a template change that drops the canonical or adds noindex.
- A CMS or plugin update rewrites robots.txt.
- A CDN or security setting starts blocking AI crawlers or adds a challenge page.
- A new marketing script slows every page down.
- A certificate renewal fails on one hostname.
None of these announce themselves. They show up weeks later as lost traffic.
What to watch
A useful monitor re-runs the same audit on a schedule and compares each run with the last:
- The score, as a single number that moves when something changes.
- Critical and high checks that start failing: noindex, robots.txt blocking, status codes, canonical, HTTPS.
- Reachability, whether the audit could run at all.
- Category trends, so a slow decline in performance or accessibility is visible.
Alerts that people read
Alert fatigue kills monitoring. Alert only when someone needs to act:
- Score drop beyond a threshold, for example five points. Smaller moves are noise from lab measurements.
- A critical or high check that newly fails. This is the alert that catches the noindex on launch day.
- The site cannot be audited, once, not on every failed run.
- Recovery, so the team knows the problem is gone.
Send alerts where the team already works. A Slack or Discord channel, a webhook into your incident tool, or an email to the person who owns the site.
Set it up with Aback Audit
- Open Monitoring and enter the address of the page to watch, usually the home page or a key template.
- Choose the frequency. The free plan monitors up to three sites weekly; Pro monitors up to fifty daily, with standard audits that sample up to 25 pages.
- Add a webhook (Slack and Discord get a readable message) or an email address, and the score drop that should trigger an alert.
- Keep the manage link. There is no account: the link, saved in your browser and shown once, is how you change or delete the monitor.
- Add the score badge to your README or status page if you want the team to see the health at a glance.
The first run sends a baseline alert, so you know the channel works.
Use the history
Each run is kept with its scores and the checks that changed. When something regresses, the run tells you when, which pins it to a release. The compare page shows exactly which checks moved between any two audits.
Check your own site
The SEO Checker runs the checks from this guide on any public page, free and without an account.
Open the SEO CheckerFrequently asked questions
How often should a site be monitored?
Weekly catches most problems before they cost much. Daily suits sites that deploy often or depend heavily on search. More often than daily rarely adds value for technical SEO.
Is this uptime monitoring?
No. Uptime monitors check every minute whether a site answers. Health monitoring checks, less often, whether the site is still crawlable, indexable, fast and correctly configured. A failed monitored audit does alert you when the site cannot be reached.
Will monitoring put load on my site?
A quick monitored audit makes a few dozen requests once a week or once a day, comparable to a visitor reading a few pages.
Can I monitor competitors?
Monitor what you have a reason to watch. The service limits how often any single site is audited, whoever asks.