Verify your domain

Why we ask

Free monitoring is for your own sites. Verifying stops one free account from watching thousands of other people's. Paid accounts never need to verify, and a domain that matches your sign-in address (you sign in as [email protected] and watch example.com) counts as verified already.

Three ways to verify

Your dashboard shows a Verify your domains box with your own code. Pick one way, then press Check now:

1. DNS record (recommended). Add a TXT record on the domain with the value owlhound-verify=<your code>. When we know who runs your DNS (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap and others), the box shows that provider's exact steps, and for some there is a Verify with … button that adds the record for you after you approve it there.
2. Homepage tag. Add <meta name="owlhound-verify" content="<your code>"> inside the <head> of your homepage. This is the way for sites on shared addresses such as GitHub Pages or Netlify subdomains, which can't take a DNS record.
3. A small file. Publish https://your-domain/.well-known/owlhound-verify.txt containing only your code.

DNS changes can take a few minutes to show. You can leave the record, tag or file in place: we look again every 30 days.

If you don't verify

After 72 hours, monitoring of that domain pauses and the dashboard says so. Verify at any time and it starts again straight away. If a domain you verified loses its record later, we mark it and keep monitoring.