The expensive failures in this business are not slow pages. They are a staging robots.txt that went live, a canonical tag pointing at a domain the client no longer owns, or a template change that dropped every meta description in a section. Each is silent, each is found weeks later, and each lands on you.
Sentinel checks watch the SEO-relevant fields of the pages that matter and notice when they change. Because the same machinery is what detects a fix landing, the detection of an accidental regression is the same code path as the detection of an intentional improvement, which is a good reason to trust it.
It also gives you an after-launch story. A redesign is the moment clients most expect traffic to drop, and a ledger that measures the changed templates against untouched sections is a far better answer than a screenshot of a flat line.
What that looks like here
- Deploy webhookPoint your pipeline at it and a release triggers a crawl of the pages that matter, rather than waiting for the next scheduled one.
- Regression detection, not just auditThe comparison is against the previous crawl of the same URL, so 'this used to be indexable' is a finding, not something a reader has to spot.
- Nothing to installNo script tag, no plugin, no repo access. We fetch the public site like a search engine and read Search Console if the client grants it.
- Migration evidenceRedirect chains, loops and broken internal links are in the catalog, and a launch is the moment they all appear at once.
Questions from people like you
Can we run it against a staging site?
Only if it is publicly reachable, and if it is, you have a bigger problem. Most teams point it at production and use the deploy webhook to crawl right after a release.
Does it need Search Console?
Not for crawling and issue detection. Search Console is what makes impact ranking and every verdict possible, so a client who will not grant read-only access limits it to an audit tool.
Everything here works the same way it does everywhere else in the product: the crawl is ours, the Search Console data is yours, and a verdict is allowed to come back as no effect. Start with one client on the free tier and decide with your own data.
Try it on your own site, free
No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.