What each alert fires on

Five rules, per site:

• Rank drop. A keyword falls by more than your threshold, and only if it was inside the tracked depth to begin with. A fall from 87 to 94 does not page anyone.
• Site down. Two consecutive five-minute probes fail. One failed probe is a dropped packet as often as it is an outage.
• Indexation loss. A crawl finds fewer indexable pages than the previous one, past your percentage.
• Audit regression. The health score falls by more than your threshold.
• Report ready. A report has finished rendering.

Channels

The in-app feed, email, a Discord webhook and a Slack webhook. The feed always works, with or without any channel configured, so an alert is never lost because a webhook was wrong.

Webhooks are per site, so an agency can send one client's alerts into that client's channel and another's somewhere else.

Setting a threshold that you will not turn off

The failure mode for alerting is not missing something. It is sending so much that the recipient stops reading, which is the same as sending nothing but costs more.

Rank drop. Start at five places. On a volatile commercial phrase, three places is weather. If you are getting several a day, raise it rather than switching the rule off.

Indexation loss. Ten per cent is a reasonable start. A site that publishes and unpublishes frequently should be higher.

Audit regression. Five points. A one point move is usually a single new page with a missing description.

What does not fire

A keyword that was never in the top 20. It cannot fall out of something it was not in.

A single failed probe. Two consecutive failures, five minutes apart, is the bar.

A day with no validated check. A missing measurement is not a drop. Positions are never written from an unvalidated result, so a quarantined check produces a gap rather than an alert that something fell to zero.

Errors alone never page anyone; silence does

The useful signal in a monitoring system is usually not an error, it is the absence of something that should have happened. A crawl that never ran, a report that never rendered, a check that has been quarantined for three days.

That is why Report ready is a rule at all: the interesting case is the report that does not arrive.

Reading the feed

Every alert carries the site, the rule, the threshold it crossed and the value that crossed it, and it links to the screen that explains it. An alert that tells you only that something changed is an interruption rather than information.

Alerts are deduplicated: the same keyword crossing the same threshold on consecutive days is one ongoing alert rather than a new one each morning.

Alerts and reports are separate

A ranking drop should reach you the day it happens. A report is a monthly summary for somebody else to read. Do not use one as the other: a client report arriving weekly because you wanted faster alerting is a report nobody reads.

Webhooks

A Discord or Slack webhook is a URL you paste in, and it is a credential: anybody holding it can post into that channel. SolSEO stores it, never displays it again in full, and shows only enough of it to tell two apart.

The message carries the site, the rule, the threshold and the value, and a link back to the screen that explains it. It is deliberately short. A monitoring message that fills a channel gets muted, and a muted channel is worse than no channel.

If a webhook starts failing, the alert still lands in the in-app feed. A channel that has stopped working is not allowed to swallow the alert.

Turning an alert into something you do

The useful question on a rank drop is not "what happened to this keyword". It is "what happened to this page".

Open the keyword, read the URL that was ranking, and look at that page in the audit. A drop that lines up with a new finding on the same page is a story with a cause. A drop with nothing beside it is usually the market moving, and the answer is to look at who took the position rather than to change anything.

Competitor positions are tracked on the same phrase for exactly this reason: position 7 means one thing when a new site appeared above you and another when the site that was at 6 published something better.