Search visibility checker

Background

A site that opens is not necessarily a site search engines can read.

The page may load when you type the address, yet the file that tells search engines what they may read (robots.txt) does not list the sitemap, the tag that says “this is the real address of this page” points to an address that redirects elsewhere, or the analytics code on the page sends data nowhere. None of this is visible on screen.

The problem

The site opens normally, but search engines may not be seeing it.

• The analytics you installed receive no data. The admin screen says “connected” and the code is on the page, yet not a single visit is recorded
• No error appears, so problems surface later. Pages open as usual, and nothing turns red anywhere staff can see
• There is no way to confirm that outsourced work was applied. A reply saying “done” is not the same as the change being live, and there is no screen that tells the two apart

We find gaps like these and turn them into a check that confirms, three times a day, not whether something is installed but whether it actually works.

What we built

• Three times a day, at 07:50, 12:50 and 18:50 — eight sites are opened in turn
• Up to twelve checks per site — does the home page load, do the different addresses resolve to one, does the “real address” tag point to the right place, can the search engine instructions file be read, does it list the sitemap, is the sitemap structured correctly, is there an ownership verification tag, is there structured data search engines recognize, is there a description, and does analytics data actually arrive
• Our checks leave nothing on your site — they only read and never change anything. If a check created fake visits, your visitor numbers would be distorted
• Alerts that fire every day stop being read — so items that are judged are kept separate from items that are only recorded. Each site is different, and sometimes an item is not a problem for a particular site. Leaving it red indefinitely means real problems get overlooked too. It is not marked as passed either. It is moved to the record, along with who confirmed it and when
• It answers only what it can — the question this tool answers is “can search engines read this site?” Search rankings and visitor numbers are different questions, and the tool does not claim to know them
• Only changes since yesterday are reported — twelve checks on eight sites three times a day add up quickly. If everything is sent, nobody reads it, and unread reports might as well not exist. Only the lines that changed are sent
• 78 automated tests run on every change — the checker cannot break quietly and keep showing green

“Passed” and “not confirmed” are recorded as different results

Any company with several websites will recognize these.

• A site with no analytics at all looks “fine”. Shown as a green light in a table, it looks the same as “visitors are being counted correctly.” We track “passed the check” and “visitors are actually counted” as separate values, and anything we could not confirm is recorded as “not confirmed”, not zero. You get a clear answer to whether a site’s visitor numbers can be trusted right now.
• Some problems appear only on the live server, never in development. However often it runs on a development machine, nothing goes wrong, but on the live server a working site shows up as “connection failed” and its other eleven checks are skipped entirely. We handle that case explicitly, and automated tests make sure the fix stays in place. When the checker shows red, you can trust it. Real outages and checker faults are never mixed up

Why three times a day

With a single daily run, a missed run leaves the whole day blank. The server that runs the checks can go down too. On a day when six morning hours were lost, the midday run filled the gap, and that day’s status was still recorded.

Changes are confirmed right away

When an ownership verification tag was added to one site, the next check picked up the change immediately (2026-08-09). Without anyone reporting it, the line appeared under “changes” in the next run. No one has to go and check whether work reported as done was actually applied.

Results

Unmet required items fell from 24 on August 12, 2026 to 16 in the 07:50 check on August 23. 16 items remain. Because the tool produces this number directly rather than a person counting it, both the progress and what is left come from the same source.

What this means for you

We build the same structure whether you run eight sites or one. You get an answer, updated three times a day, to whether your sites can be found in search right now. Whether work done by an agency was actually applied, whether your analytics are actually receiving data, what changed between yesterday and today: today these can only be found by someone opening each site. Because the number of unmet items stays on screen, the next fixes remain as a list.

See more work built the same way under Web data collection.

See the other systems we use to run our own company under Internal operations automation.