Search visibility

• Page settings: robots and Googlebot meta tags, the X-Robots-Tag header, the canonical link, whether the title and description are present, and the document language. These come from the existing successful HTML homepage check, and from active GET page checks on paid plans.
• Robots: about daily, the rules for Googlebot on the homepage and checked pages, including specific user-agent groups, wildcards, and Allow exceptions. A missing robots.txt means crawling is allowed.
• Sitemap: about daily, the first Sitemap directive in robots.txt, or /sitemap.xml. PageHum checks that it answers and parses as a URL set or sitemap index. An index shows its number of child sitemaps; those children are not crawled.

Free watches the homepage. Starter, Pro, and Ultra also watch their active GET page checks. HEAD checks and non-HTML responses have no page metadata to inspect. Add pages under Pages checked.

The first check is a baseline and sends nothing, even for a site that has always said noindex. A later change to noindex, a new robots block, a changed canonical pointing to another host or path, or a formerly valid sitemap disappearing opens a Search visibility issue. It includes the before and after settings and a Copy prompt.

The next alert pass notices the change; returning to good settings clears it and sends a recovery notice. Every plan gets the in-app notice and browser push if enabled. Paid plans also use their problem email and chat preferences. Free keeps its email and chat channels for outages.

Under Domain, certificate, and server, expand Checked pages to see titles, descriptions, language, canonical targets, and indexing settings. Missing titles or descriptions are recorded without creating regression alerts.

Checks use the public server response, without running page JavaScript. A page that redirects has no HTML observation until its checked URL serves HTML. Page and resource bodies are capped at 512 KiB; interrupted or oversized responses keep the last known values. Resource rounds have an 8-second budget and follow at most three redirects on the same HTTPS origin. External sitemap origins are shown as not checked.

If a deploy unexpectedly changed search settings, check the app’s metadata, robots.txt, sitemap routes, staging flags, environment variables, and the CMS setting that hides a site from search.