Alerts are essential in SEO if you are working on a project associated with website monitoring, quality assurance, non-regression tests, or if you are interested in automating certain aspects of your regular auditing.

Oncrawl allows you to customize alerts that are triggered at the end of an analysis.

The conditions for triggering an alert are associated with a crawl profile and based on crawl metrics.

You can receive these alerts outside of the Oncrawl platform.

To set up a monitoring system with alerts, you will need to schedule regular crawls in order to be able to detect deviations for a given metric or set of metrics.

You can find current alerts on the project home page, under the Tasks section at the top of the page.

If you don't have any alerts set up, this is where you can create a new one using the Create an alert button.

Hover over the tab name to see how many alerts have been triggered recently.

This tab contains a table with seven (7) columns that can be sorted and filtered. By default, it is sorted by the alerts that were most recently checked.

Use the filters to show specific types of alert status, such as only showing triggered alerts:

From the Alerts tab in the project’s Tasks section, click Create an alert.

The dataset determines the type of data and metrics available for the alert.

Comparisons: Pages uses the latest automatically generated Crawl over Crawl comparison for the selected crawl configuration. Manually created comparisons do not trigger alerts.

Comparable metrics can provide:

For example, set Is same title to false to find pages whose title differs between Crawl 1 and Crawl 2. Set Delta follow inlinks to greater than 10 to find pages that gained more than ten followed internal links.

The Links dataset applies the alert definition to individual links rather than pages.

For example, you can create an alert to monitor:

Select the crawl configuration that the alert should use. The crawl configuration determines which pages are analyzed and which metrics are available.

Choose a crawl configuration that runs regularly so the alert can evaluate new results over time.

Important: The crawl configuration is part of the alert definition and cannot be changed after the alert is created.

Use Value mode to trigger the alert based on the number of pages or links matching the alert definition.

Use Ratio mode (%) to compare the results matching the alert definition with a reference group. The alert triggers when the resulting percentage reaches the threshold you define.

Add the metric and filters that define what the alert should monitor. The available fields depend on the selected dataset and crawl configuration.

You can combine conditions using Oncrawl Query Language (OQL).

Use the Preview chart to check how the alert definition would have behaved against previous crawl results. Change the displayed period when you need more historical context.

Set the value or percentage at which the alert should trigger. Use the preview to choose a threshold that identifies meaningful changes without generating unnecessary notifications.

When available, combine two thresholds with AND or OR to define an expected range.

Choose who should be notified when the alert triggers. Available notification channels include:

By default, the workspace owner receives the notification by email.

Optionally, edit the alert’s name and description. Click Create in the upper-right corner. The alert becomes active immediately.

Clicking Show/edit details beside an alert in the Tasks table opens details for this alert.

Two tabs are available:

The alert history records every time the alert was checked during an analysis.

The following information is available:

The alert settings display the crawl profile, the OQL, the preview, the threshold, and the notification settings for the alert.

All of these elements except for the crawl profile can be modified.

By default, the owner of the current workspace will be notified by email if an alert triggers. You can change this behavior by setting different notification information.

You can set notifications by:

Alerts that cannot be checked during an analysis are reported as having an error status. When this occurs, a warning will appear at the top of the Alerts tab in the Tasks section of the project page.

Filter the table by Last alert status to view the alerts in error.

To obtain more information about an alert in error, click on Show/Edit details.

A warning at the top of both the Alert history and the Settings tabs explains the error. Often, this error is related to metrics used in the OQL for the alert that are no longer available in the associated crawl profile.

Either correct the crawl profile, or create a duplicate the alert (using the three dots at the right of the alert's listing in the Tasks table on the project page and choosing Duplicate) and assign the duplicated alert to a crawl profile that includes the missing data.