HTML Snapshots & Monitoring
Understand how Search Sentinel automatically detects changes on your website and creates historical records.
How Monitoring Works
Automated Checks
A designated "runner" visits your configured URLs at the interval you set (e.g., every 60 minutes). During each visit, it performs a fresh HTTP request and analyzes the response.
What we look for:
- Changes in HTML content (title, headings, meta tags)
- HTTP status code changes (e.g., 200 to 404)
- Response header modifications
- Presence of required code snippets
HTML Snapshots
A snapshot is a stored record of your page's key HTML elements at a specific point in time. We store the entire raw HTML body for you to check afterwards. To save space and processing power, we clean up HTML snapshots that do not contain any tracked changes.
When are they taken?
Snapshots are taken only when a change is detected. If our runner visits your site and everything is exactly the same as the last check, no new snapshot is created. This ensures your history is clean and only focuses on actual updates.
What is stored?
Each snapshot includes timestamped values for Title, Meta Description, H1, Canonical URL, Robots Meta Tags, and other tracked elements.
Robots.txt Monitoring
Your `robots.txt` file is the gateway for search engine crawlers. Accidental changes here can de-index your entire site.
Version History
Just like HTML snapshots, we maintain a version history of your robots.txt file. Every time the content changes, we save a new version.
Change History & Diffs
Visual Diff Viewer
When viewing the history of a URL, you can click on any "Change Detected" event. This opens a side-by-side or inline comparison view (a "diff") showing exactly what changed.
- Green: Content that was added.
- Red: Content that was removed.