Best SEO monitoring tools: LaunchScaler Watch and the alternatives
LaunchScaler Watch, Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Little Warden, UptimeRobot and more, compared on what they watch, how often and price.
LLaunchScaler·Published ·10 min read
The best SEO monitoring tools for a small site are LaunchScaler Watch for a scheduled technical scan with uptime checks, Google Search Console for Google's own index and click data, and one tool per gap after that: a rank tracker, a site-health crawler, an uptime monitor or a page-change monitor. No single tool watches every layer, so the list below is grouped by what each one actually watches.
Every price, check frequency and limit below was read on the tool's own pricing page in September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, the table says so.
How do SEO monitoring tools compare on what they watch and how often?
SEO monitoring tools split into four kinds: site-health auditors and crawlers that check directives and technical errors, rank trackers that record keyword positions, uptime monitors that check the server answers, and page-change monitors that diff what a page shows. They differ most on check frequency and on whether they read headers and robots.txt at all.
Tool
What it watches
How often
Starting price
Free option
1. LaunchScaler Watch
Technical re-scan plus uptime of a health endpoint
What is the best SEO monitoring tool for a small website?
A small site is best served by a combination rather than one tool: a scheduled technical audit with uptime checks, Google Search Console for Google's own data, and a rank tracker only if you have keywords worth tracking daily. LaunchScaler Watch covers the first part for one website at $29 a month.
30+ checks per URL, including robots.txt changes and domain expiry
"All day, every day"
£24.99/month for 20 URLs
40-day free trial
5. Conductor Monitoring
Page changes and technical issues, 24/7
Continuous
Not published
3-week free trial
6. Semrush
Keyword positions, plus a site audit
Positions daily
$139/month (SEO plan)
Limited free account
7. Ahrefs
Keyword positions, plus a site audit
Positions weekly
$129/month (Lite)
Webmaster Tools for verified sites
8. UptimeRobot
Whether the server answers
Every 5 minutes free, down to 15 seconds paid
$108 a year (Solo)
50 monitors
9. Better Stack
Whether the server answers, with on-call alerts
Up to every 30 seconds
$34/month per responder
10 monitors
10. Visualping
What a page visibly shows, its text and elements
Every 60 minutes free, down to every 2 minutes
$14/month
5 pages
Which SEO monitoring tool should a small site start with?
Start with the two that cover the most failures for the least effort: a scheduled audit that diffs technical checks between runs, and Google Search Console. LaunchScaler Watch leads this list for a small site because one plan covers both a scheduled re-scan and uptime checks between scans, the two jobs most small teams stop doing by hand.
1. LaunchScaler Watch: a re-scan every two weeks, with uptime checks between runs
LaunchScaler Watch re-runs the free scan on your site every two weeks, automatically, and emails a diff on every run. The diff shows only what changed since last time: which checks moved, by how many points, and the evidence behind the shift. Evidence is attached to every finding, so a drop arrives with the header, rule or response that caused it.
Between scans, Watch runs uptime checks on your health endpoint and alerts you the moment it goes down. It also alerts you when a check drops below the published pass bar. The re-scan runs the same checks as LaunchScaler's free scan, which include search directives, AI crawler access, security headers and certificates, speed and visual problems, and whether key flows work. It does not include the answer-engine panel or the backlink checks that the one-time full audit adds.
It costs $29/mo for one website, with one domain per subscription, and you can cancel whenever you like. Watch does not track keyword positions, so pair it with Search Console for rankings. See how Watch works.
2. Google Search Console: free, and the only source of Google's own index data
Search Console is the only tool that reports what Google itself has indexed, and it is free. Google says: "If new issues are found by Google on your site, you'll receive an email from Search Console alerting you." Its Performance report gives clicks, impressions, CTR and average position by query and page.
Its limit as a monitor is timing. Every report reflects Google's last crawl, so an alert about a noindex or a server error arrives after Google has already acted on it. Google itself suggests checking your account "around once every month, or when you make changes to the site's content." Use it for the monthly review, not as the alarm.
Which site-health crawlers watch technical SEO?
Site-health crawlers fetch your pages the way a search engine does and report technical errors: status codes, redirects, canonicals, noindex, titles and broken links. They catch the directive changes that uptime and visual monitors miss. They differ in whether they run on a schedule by themselves and whether they alert you or wait for you to open them.
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider: a desktop crawler you schedule yourself
The SEO Spider is free for crawls of up to 500 URLs. A licence costs $279 per licence per year and removes the URL limit. Scheduling and crawl comparison are paid features: the free version's feature table marks both as unavailable.
With a licence you can schedule a crawl and compare it with the previous one, which gives you a change report across status codes, directives and on-page elements. It runs on your own machine or server, so monitoring means leaving that machine on and reading the comparison yourself. It suits a developer who wants full control over what is crawled.
4. Little Warden: checks on the technical details, with a renewal calendar
Little Warden describes itself as monitoring "for changes all day, every day" and lists checks for robots.txt changes, domain name expiration, redirect breaking, Core Web Vitals, tracking tags and content changes, 30+ checks in all. It sends alerts through Slack, email, messenger, API and webhook, and its renewal report covers upcoming domain and SSL certificate renewals.
Plans are priced per URL watched. The Freelancer plan is £24.99 a month for 20 URLs with up to 10 checks per URL, and the Small Team plan is £34.99 a month for 100 URLs. There is a 40-day free trial with no card. Its pricing page does not state the exact interval between checks.
5. Conductor Monitoring: continuous monitoring for larger sites
Conductor Monitoring says it provides "24/7 continuous monitoring" that surfaces technical issues "the moment they appear," with alerts routed "to the right person at the right sensitivity level." Its documentation says it tracks "newly added, removed, and modified pages" and surfaces indexability issues, Core Web Vitals regressions and broken structured data, with alerts by email, Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Conductor does not publish a price on its monitoring page. It offers a three-week free trial or a demo. It is built for sites with many pages and several teams; a five-page SaaS site will use a small part of it.
Which rank trackers are worth paying for?
A rank tracker is worth paying for once you have a set of keywords you already rank for and want daily or weekly positions, including competitors. It reports outcomes, not causes: a rank tracker shows a page fell, and a site-health tool tells you it fell because it turned noindex. Both suites below also include a site audit.
6. Semrush: daily position tracking
Semrush's SEO plan costs $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually, and includes 5 websites to monitor and 500 keywords to track daily, plus Position Tracking and Site Audit. Its higher plans raise the keyword limit and add tracked AI prompts.
Daily tracking is the reason to choose it over a weekly tracker: a fall shows the next day. For a small site with a handful of commercial keywords, most of the plan will go unused, and Search Console's position data may be enough.
7. Ahrefs: weekly rank tracking and a free audit for verified sites
Ahrefs Lite costs $129 a month and includes 750 tracked keywords and 100,000 site audit crawl credits a month. Its pricing table lists Rank Tracker updates as weekly on every plan, including Enterprise. An always-on site audit is sold separately at $200 a month per project.
For a site owner on a budget, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is the useful part: a free Site Audit that checks for "170+ common technical & on-page SEO issues" on sites you verify, with 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month.
Which uptime monitors fill the gaps between audits?
An uptime monitor checks that your server answers, every few minutes or seconds, and alerts when it stops. It catches outages that a scheduled audit misses between runs. It does not read what the page says, so a page answering 200 with a noindex passes. The difference is covered in uptime monitoring vs SEO monitoring.
8. UptimeRobot: a generous free plan
UptimeRobot's free plan checks 50 monitors at a 5-minute interval and is described as "good for hobby and non-profit projects." It includes keyword monitoring, which can check that a phrase appears in the response. The Solo plan starts at $108 a year with a 60-second interval, and Team, at $420 a year, drops the interval to 30 seconds. Its page notes that SSL monitoring is included only in paid plans.
9. Better Stack: uptime with on-call scheduling
Better Stack's free tier covers 10 monitors and heartbeats with Slack and email alerts. Paid use starts at $34 a month per responder licence ($29 billed annually), with phone and SMS alerts, check frequency of up to 30 seconds, SSL and TLD expiration monitoring and HTTP keyword checks. It suits a team that wants incident management and on-call rotas with its uptime alerts.
Do page-change monitors count as SEO monitoring?
Page-change monitors count only partly. They diff what a page shows, so they catch a rewritten headline, a removed section or a price change. Most compare rendered pixels or visible text, which means they miss a noindex header, a robots.txt rule or a canonical tag, because none of those appear on screen.
10. Visualping: visual, text and element changes
Every Visualping plan includes "visual, text, and element change detection," with AI summaries of each change and email and webhook alerts. The free plan covers 5 pages and 150 checks a month at most once an hour. Personal 1K costs $14 a month for 10 pages checked as often as every 15 minutes, and Business plans start at $140 a month and add Slack and Microsoft Teams alerts.
It is the right tool for watching copy, prices and competitors' pages. For the SEO-breaking changes, see which change monitors read headers and directives in website change monitoring tools.
Which combination does a small SaaS need?
A small SaaS needs coverage of four failures (the site going down, a directive flipping, a slow regression, and falling clicks) at a cost that matches its traffic. Most can skip the research suites until they have keywords worth tracking daily. These combinations cover all four at different budgets.
Budget
Combination
What it leaves uncovered
Free
Search Console, UptimeRobot free, deploy checks you script yourself
Two-weekly audit and speed trend, unless you run them by hand
Low
LaunchScaler Watch and Search Console
Daily keyword positions
Mid
LaunchScaler Watch, Search Console and Semrush or Ahrefs
Little for a site under a few hundred pages
Many sites or pages
Conductor or Little Warden, a rank tracker, a dedicated uptime tool
Needs someone to own the alerts
Whatever you pick, add AI answer tracking separately if AI engines matter to you, because none of the uptime or rank tools above ask ChatGPT or Perplexity anything. Tracking AI visibility over time sets up a repeatable prompt panel. The full schedule of what to check and when is in SEO monitoring for a small site.
Get the audit and uptime half for one website
If your site has a handful of pages and nobody on the team owns SEO, the scheduled audit and the uptime checks are the half that goes undone. LaunchScaler Watch covers them for one website at $29/mo: a re-scan every two weeks, an emailed diff on every run, uptime checks on your health endpoint, and an alert when a check drops below the bar or the site goes down. Start watching.
Is there a free SEO monitoring tool?
Google Search Console is free and emails you when Google finds new issues on your site. UptimeRobot's free plan checks 50 monitors every 5 minutes, and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives verified sites a free Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month.
03
What is the difference between an SEO monitoring tool and a rank tracker?
A rank tracker records where your pages rank for keywords you choose. An SEO monitoring tool watches the technical causes behind those positions, such as noindex tags, robots.txt rules, redirects, speed and uptime, and alerts you when one changes.
04
How often do SEO monitoring tools check a site?
It ranges from every 15 seconds for paid uptime monitors to weekly for some rank trackers. Semrush updates tracked positions daily, Ahrefs Rank Tracker updates weekly on every plan, and LaunchScaler Watch re-scans your site every two weeks with uptime checks in between.
05
Do I need Semrush or Ahrefs to monitor SEO?
Not for monitoring alone. Both are research suites whose rank tracking and site audit features also monitor, starting at $139 a month for Semrush's SEO plan and $129 a month for Ahrefs Lite. A small site can cover the technical side for less and use Search Console for rankings.
Search Console's Core Web Vitals report uses 28 days of field data, so a regression shows slowly. Add real-user monitoring and lab checks to see it sooner.
When Google organic traffic drops, check tracking, then indexing, then rankings, then AI Overviews and seasonality. The order, the reports and the tells.
