What does our free bot find for "Found on the web"?

Analyse → Backlinks → Found on the web has a part Our bot: what the bot watches for and what it found by kind. What it found is in the list Pages found on the same page, marked Found by our web watch (with every other source that found the same page), so nothing is listed twice; Show only what the bot found filters the list.

What the bot looks for

When you add a project, it is put on the bot's list with what to look out for:

• your website's address (with or without www., and any subdomain);
• your business name, from your business details under Local (Business Profile or the details you entered yourself), the brand terms in the backlink settings, and the project's name. Very short names and names made only of common words (such as "Home Services") are not watched, so pages that merely use those words are not reported;
• your phone number, compared on the number itself, so "(01) 234 5678", "+353 1 234 5678" and "00353 1 2345678" are the same;
• your postcode, used only together with your name or phone on a directory site.

Our bot shows what is on the list ("Watching for").

What counts

• Link: a page on another website links to yours. Link (nofollow) when the link says nofollow, ugc or sponsored, or the page says nofollow as a whole.
• Mention: a page writes your website's address, your name or your phone number without linking to you.
• Directory listing: a page on a directory site (the same list of directories as Local → Citations) shows your name or phone.

Your own website never counts. Each row shows the page, the link text or a short piece of the text around the mention (at most 200 characters; e-mail addresses are removed), the address the link points to and its attribute (nofollow, ugc and sponsored apart), where the page came from, first seen, last seen and Live or Lost. A page the bot read counts as verified: SEOmise does not read it a second time.

Where the pages come from

One central bot reads public pages and checks each one against every business on its list at once. Pages come from directory sites in your country, news pages that name your business (from the free GDELT news index, and news feeds our team adds), pages already known to link to your competitors, and pages one link away from a page that links to you. The bot follows each site's robots.txt, honours opt-outs, reads one page at a time per site at a slow pace, and has a daily limit, shared with SEOmise's other readers (one daily total for all of them). It asks a site whether a page changed since its last reading, and a page that has not changed is not read again.

Lost

Each page is read again after 14 days (our team can change this). If the link or mention is no longer there, or the page answers that it is gone, the row turns Lost. A page that does not answer at all is never marked lost: the bot tries again later.

Which platform you use does not matter

The bot reads other websites, so this works the same whatever your website runs on (WordPress, Laravel, Shopify, Wix, plain PHP or anything else). To fix a listing that shows an old phone number or name, change it on the directory site itself; Local → Citations has the steps per directory.

E-mails about what was found

• "I've added results": once per project, when the bot has found something for it. It goes as soon as the pages found for your project in its first round have been read, or 6 hours after the first finding (by default), whichever comes first. It shows what was found by kind and some of the findings, each linking to Found on the web.
• Weekly e-mail: on Monday mornings (by default), one e-mail for all your projects with what was found since, only in weeks when something new was found.

Both go to the workspace owners and the people who manage the project (and an agency's clients for their own projects, as the agency chooses), and only about projects you may see. They also appear in your notification bell. To stop them by e-mail, turn off Project bot findings under Account → Notifications; the e-mail with your first website check results is not affected. Our team can change the day, the hour and the waiting time.

Free, and in early access

Our bot uses no credits. While it is in early access, Our bot shows Beta: press Ask for early access at the top of Found on the web and we e-mail you when it opens. Your website is already on the list, so results start appearing once it opens.