SEO Sentry – SEO Change Detection & Alerts

SEO Sentry is an SEO change monitoring plugin for WordPress. It watches important SEO elements on your pages and across your site, records what changed, and alerts you when something may need attention. https://youtu.be/U3m7dL_zDV8 A page can accidentally become noindex after an update. A canonical URL can change. Schema markup can disappear. A redirect can start pointing outside your site. Your robots.txt or XML sitemap can also change without anyone noticing. SEO Sentry creates a baseline of the SEO elements it monitors and compares future checks against that baseline. When something changes, it records the finding as critical, warning, or informational so you can quickly understand what happened. It does not replace your SEO plugin or change your SEO settings. It monitors them for unexpected changes. SEO health check from the first minute SEO Sentry checks your site immediately when you open it for the first time. You do not have to wait for a change. The dashboard shows problems that already exist:

• The WordPress setting "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is on
• robots.txt blocks all search engines
• No valid XML sitemap
• The front page is noindex, has an error, or has no title or meta description
• Monitored pages that are noindex or do not open correctly

Monitor individual WordPress pages Add pages to Monitored Pages individually or in bulk. You can:

• Select pages from any public WordPress post type
• Add multiple URLs at once
• Pause or resume monitoring for individual pages
• Pause or resume multiple pages in bulk
• Remove monitored pages individually or in bulk

Each successful first check creates a baseline. Later checks are compared with that baseline to detect SEO changes. SEO changes SEO Sentry monitors SEO Sentry checks important on-page and technical SEO signals, including:

• Robots meta tags: detects noindex, nofollow, and other robots meta changes
• X-Robots-Tag header: detects noindex sent by your server, which never appears in the page source
• SEO titles: detects changed or removed page titles
• Meta descriptions: detects changed or removed meta descriptions
• Canonical URLs: detects changed or removed canonicals, including canonicals pointing to another domain
• Structured data and schema: detects schema types being added or removed and JSON-LD that no longer parses correctly
• Open Graph tags: detects changes to social sharing metadata
• Twitter/X card tags: detects changes to card metadata
• H1 headings: detects missing, changed, or multiple H1 headings
• Content size: detects significant word-count drops
• HTTP status errors: detects monitored pages returning errors
• Redirects: detects new redirects and redirects that lead outside the site

Site-wide SEO monitoring SEO Sentry also runs checks that apply to the whole WordPress site. robots.txt monitoring Detects changes to robots.txt and raises a critical finding if the file begins blocking the entire site from crawling. AI crawler rules Checks robots.txt rules related to AI and search services, including directives for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, and other supported agents or tokens. This helps you see when crawler access rules change. SEO Sentry does not modify those rules. XML sitemap monitoring Checks whether the XML sitemap is reachable and valid, and detects significant drops in the number of URLs found in the sitemap. WordPress search visibility Detects when WordPress's "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" setting is enabled or changed. SEO change history Every detected change is stored in the Change History. Findings are graded as:

• Critical: changes that may have an immediate effect on crawling, indexing, or page availability
• Warning: changes that may require review
• Info: lower-risk changes recorded for reference

You can filter the history by severity, status, and monitored page to quickly find the changes you need to review. SEO monitoring dashboard The SEO Sentry dashboard gives you an overview of the site's current monitoring status. It includes:

• SEO health check of the site now
• Open critical, warning, and informational findings
• 14-day SEO change trend
• Changes grouped by type
• Pages and findings that need attention
• Monitoring status
• Recent monitoring activity
• AI crawler activity statistics

Email alerts SEO Sentry can send one email digest after a check run when qualifying changes are found. Instead of sending a separate email for every finding, related findings are included in a single digest. You can choose which severity levels trigger an email:

• Critical only
• Critical and warning
• Critical, warning, and informational

Scheduled SEO checks Choose how often SEO Sentry checks your monitored pages:

• Hourly
• Twice daily
• Daily
• Manual only

SEO Sentry also schedules an automatic re-check about 90 seconds after a WordPress plugin, theme, or core update. This can help catch SEO regressions caused by software updates soon after they happen. AI crawler activity tracking SEO Sentry records requests from supported AI crawler user agents when they visit your WordPress site. This lets you see activity from crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot, and other supported bots without connecting an analytics service. No additional setup is required. Crawler activity tracking reports visits. It does not guarantee that content will be indexed, cited, or used by an AI platform. Configurable history retention Choose how long SEO Sentry keeps monitoring history in your WordPress database. This gives you control over how much historical SEO change data is retained. Works with your existing SEO setup SEO Sentry is designed to monitor the SEO output of your WordPress site rather than replace the tools that create it. You can use it alongside your existing SEO plugin, theme, page builder, structured data setup, sitemap system, and other WordPress tools. If one of those tools changes an SEO-relevant part of a monitored page, SEO Sentry can record the difference during the next check. Multisite support SEO Sentry supports WordPress Multisite. Each site in the network maintains its own:

• Monitored pages
• SEO change history
• Settings
• Scheduled monitoring configuration

Privacy and data handling SEO Sentry does not require an account, API key, or external monitoring service. Page snapshots, findings, settings, monitoring history, and crawler activity are stored in your WordPress database. Scheduled checks use WordPress functionality to request the pages and site resources being monitored. SEO Sentry does not collect usage telemetry or send monitoring data to the plugin developer. 🔗 Useful Links 🚀 Source code on GitHub

1. Install SEO Sentry through Plugins → Add New, or upload it to /wp-content/plugins/seo-sentry/.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Open SEO Sentry → Monitored Pages.
4. Add the WordPress pages or URLs you want to monitor.
5. Allow the first successful check to create the SEO baseline for each page.
6. Open Settings to choose the check frequency, email alert threshold, notification address, and history retention period.

Future checks compare the current SEO state with the saved baseline and record any detected changes.

v1.2.2 (Nov 4, 2026)

• New: The dashboard shows an SEO health check with the problems your site has now, for example a noindex front page, a robots.txt that blocks search engines or a missing XML sitemap.
• New: A short product tour shows each part of SEO Sentry the first time you open it, and the question-mark button starts it again at any time.
• Improved: SEO Sentry starts its first check as soon as you open it, so the dashboard shows results immediately.
• Improved: The Settings tabs now have icons, and tabs and selectors use a calmer style.

v1.2.1 (Oct 19, 2026)

• Fixed: The Upgrade to Pro button now opens the SEO Sentry Pro pricing page.

v1.2.0 (Oct 19, 2026)

• New: Detects when your server starts to tell search engines not to index a page with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
• New: Detects when your server stops sending a noindex instruction for a page in the X-Robots-Tag header.
• New: Detects when the X-Robots-Tag header that your server sends for a page changes.
• New: If SEO Sentry cannot find your sitemap, you can enter its address on the Site Checks page or in Settings > Checks.
• New: The app now shows what each SEO Sentry Pro feature does, with a short summary on each locked screen.
• Improved: Site Checks shows the HTTP status and size of each answer, and every address that SEO Sentry looked at to find the sitemap.
• Improved: All labels, help text, change explanations and alert emails use short, plain English that is easier to read, also if English is not your first language.
• Improved: The AI crawler visits card on the Dashboard has a "View all" link to the full list on Site Checks.
• Improved: Long change descriptions in Change History show on 2 lines, and the table always fits the screen.
• Fixed: If the server sends an empty answer to SEO Sentry's own requests, SEO Sentry now reports a monitoring problem instead of "No critical issues".
• Fixed: A failed robots.txt or sitemap check now shows the real error instead of "This file is empty" or "No sitemap found".
• Fixed: The browser console no longer shows "Missing server variable" errors.

v1.1.0 (Oct 7, 2026)

• New: Switch the dashboard between the last 7 days, 30 days and 12 months.
• Improved: Hovering the change-type chart now shows each type's count and share of all changes.
• Improved: SEO Sentry now stores its data under its own name, so pages you monitored and their history before this update do not carry over; deactivate and reactivate the plugin after updating to set it up again.
• Fixed: Dashboard charts now count every change, even when a period has more than 100.
• Fixed: A stray box no longer appears in the search field when adding a page to monitor.

v1.0.3 (Sep 28, 2026)

• Improved: Added screenshots and a short overview video to the plugin page.

v1.0.2 (Sep 23, 2026)

• Fixed: Admin screens that loaded unstyled and blank in 1.0.1, because that release was packaged without its stylesheet and configuration.

v1.0.1 (Sep 22, 2026)

• Improved: Settings now save on their own as you change them, with a short confirmation, so there is no Save button to forget.
• Improved: Settings are laid out one per row with clearer labels and help text, in a narrower column that is easier to read on wide screens.
• Improved: The Monitored Pages table now labels its Remove column.
• Improved: An empty robots.txt now reads "nothing is blocked from crawling" instead of showing "(empty file)".

v1.0.0 (Sep 21, 2026)

• Initial release.