We make one of these, so read this knowing that. What we can promise is that every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page, on the date shown in its row, that we say plainly when a competitor is the better choice, and that we have not put ourselves first.
SEO monitoring is the continuous checking of a live site for changes that affect whether search engines can crawl and index it. It is not an audit. An audit is a snapshot you take; monitoring is a watch you leave running. The distinction matters because the failures that cost the most traffic are the ones nobody was looking for: a noindex that ships with a Tuesday deploy, a Disallow added to clean up staging, a canonical that starts pointing at the wrong URL.
Uptime monitoring does not catch these. A page can return 200 with perfect uptime and carry a directive that removes it from search entirely.
| Tool | Price | What it is | Alerts | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Little Warden | from £24.99/mo | continuous change monitoring for SEO signals | continuous | 2026-08-23 |
| stillindexed | $39/mo, $79/mo, $349 once | continuous SEO change monitoring | continuous | — |
| Conductor Monitoring (was ContentKing) | no public price | enterprise real-time SEO monitoring | continuous | 2026-09-02 |
| Screaming Frog | £199/yr, free to 500 URLs | desktop crawler with scheduled crawls and crawl comparison | scheduled crawl, then you look | 2026-08-26 |
| changedetection.io | $8.99/mo, free self-hosted | generic page change detection, open source | continuous | 2026-08-23 |
| SEORadar | from $199/mo | automatic SEO-aware change alerts between full-site audits | scheduled crawl, then you look | 2026-09-02 |
| Oh Dear | from $17/mo | uptime and site health monitoring with manual expectations | continuous | 2026-09-02 |
Each price was read from the vendor's own pricing page on the date in its row, between 23 August and 2 September 2026. Vendors change them; follow the links to confirm.
From £24.99/mo. 20 URLs on Freelancer, 650 on Agency at £59.99.
The established tool in this category and the one we are most often compared with. It watches a similar set of signals, it has been doing it for years, and it offers a 40 day trial with no card. We offer no trial at all, so if trying a monitor properly before spending anything matters to you, this is the honest answer and you should start here.
$39/mo Starter, $79/mo Agency, $349 once for lifetime.
Starter is 15 sites at up to 25 URLs each, checked every 30 minutes. Agency is 50 sites at up to 25 URLs each, checked every 15 minutes. Alerts go to Telegram, email and Slack, and the check that matters is a semantic diff: we alert when a directive changes, not when the HTML churns.
Pick us when you are watching a lot of URLs across a lot of client sites and want the alert in minutes rather than hours. Do not pick us when you want to trial software before buying, because we do not offer one. What we offer instead is an unconditional 30 day refund and every check available as a free ungated tool, so you can see exactly what the engine does before you spend anything.
No public price figure. 21-day trial, no sales call required for it.
ContentKing was the reference product in this space, became Conductor Website Monitoring and is now Conductor Monitoring. Paid price figures are not published, though plan descriptions are, and a direct 21-day trial exists. Alert channels are documented too: in-app, email, Slack and Teams. If you need whole-site continuous crawling with SSO and a procurement process, that is the right shape. If you are one person with fifteen client sites, it is not.
The best tool here at what it does, which is crawling an entire site and letting you dig through everything. The licence also schedules crawls at intervals you choose, exports automatically, compares crawls against each other, and emails you when a crawl has finished, so the "you have to sit in front of it" version of this comparison is false and we have corrected it before. What the notification tells you is that a crawl ran; it does not name the directive that changed. Most people should own it and a monitor; they answer different questions.
$8.99/mo hosted, free self-hosted, open source.
Genuinely good, genuinely cheap, and open source. The catch for this use case is that it detects that a page changed, not that a directive changed. It gives you trigger text and CSS/XPath filters, so you can absolutely teach it to watch a meta tag; what it will not do is interpret the directive for you. Deciding what matters, writing the selector, and keeping it correct across every page and every redesign is work you own. If you enjoy that kind of tuning, the price is unbeatable.
From $199/mo (Lite). Weekly URL tests and weekly audits on the public quota.
A genuine direct competitor: it watches a whole site and names SEO changes automatically. The published quota is weekly rather than our per-URL cycle, and it is priced for that scope.
From $17/mo for two sites. Uptime checked every minute.
Broad site-health monitoring: uptime, TLS, sitemaps, domain expiry. It can catch an accidental noindex through response-header assertions you write yourself; reading robots.txt against a path and comparing a canonical target is not a built-in.
Semrush Site Audit and Ahrefs Site Audit run on a schedule, typically daily or weekly, as one feature of a large suite. If you already pay for either, use it, and understand that a weekly crawl finds a Tuesday noindex on Sunday.
Uptime monitors such as UptimeRobot answer a different question. They confirm the server responded. They do not read what it responded with.
Lumar, Oncrawl and Botify are enterprise crawl platforms. Powerful, priced accordingly, and none of them publish a number.
Every check our monitor runs is available as a free tool with no account and no email gate. Run one on a client URL now, and if the result is fine, that is the point: monitoring is for the day it is not.
We make one of the products being compared, so the useful thing we can offer is not another claim. These run one check against any URL, free, with no account and no email.
If a result surprises you on a client site, that is the thing this category exists to catch. Six checks when a site disappears from Google walks the same ground by hand.