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An audit tells you how a site looks today. A monitor tells you when that changes — it re-runs the audit on a schedule, compares it to the last one, and emails you when something breaks. Monitors are configured in your dashboard and are a Pro feature.
Scheduled runs do not spend your monthly audit allowance. One daily monitor would otherwise consume thirty of a Pro account’s fifty audits and crowd out checking pages by hand. The cap on how many sites you watch is what bounds the crawling instead.

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What counts as a change

Seven fields are compared between runs, page by page: These are the ones that decide how a page looks when it is shared, or where search sends people. A change is reported with both values:
Whitespace is not a change. Values are compared after collapsing runs of spaces and newlines, so a deploy that reflows your templates does not report every page as different.

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What earns an email

Not everything that changes. You are emailed when:
  • a page gains an issue it did not have
  • a page that was reachable no longer is
You are not emailed for a reworded description, a retitled page, or an issue being fixed. Those still appear in the audit; they do not warrant an interruption.
This restraint is deliberate. Monitoring that reports every content edit gets filtered into a folder nobody opens, and the one alert that mattered goes with it.
The first run of a new monitor never emails — there is nothing to compare it against, and every existing issue would look new. A site that stays broken produces one email, not one per run. Alerts have a cooldown of about a day.

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What the email says

Pages that changed but did not break are listed after the problems, with their before and after, so a skim reaches what is wrong first.

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Where the email goes

By default, to the address you sign in with. Each monitor can send its alerts somewhere else instead — a shared inbox, an on-call address, or whoever actually looks after that site. Open the monitor, choose Settings, and enter the address. A confirmation is sent to that address first, and the link in it is valid for 24 hours. Until it is confirmed, alerts keep going to the account holder — so a typo means you keep receiving them, rather than nobody receiving them.
The recipient is per monitor, not per account. Two sites watched by the same account can alert two different teams.
To go back to the account holder, clear the address on that monitor.

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Scheduling

A new monitor runs on the next tick rather than after a full interval, so you see the first result within about fifteen minutes. After that, each run is scheduled from its slot rather than from when the previous crawl finished — a daily monitor stays on its hour instead of drifting later every day by however long the crawl took. Pausing a monitor stops it without losing its history. Resuming schedules the next run from now, so a monitor paused for a month does not immediately audit your site several times over to catch up.

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What a monitored run does to your site

Exactly what a manual site audit does: one page at a time, obeying robots.txt, backing off if your server starts returning errors. A weekly monitor of a 200-page site is 200 requests a week. If that is more than you want, robots.txt is the control — our crawler explains itself and obeys it.