Receipts · read only
A monthly record of what changed on your website.
Someone is being paid to work on your site. Receipts crawls it once a month and writes down what is different from last month: titles, content, pages, structured data, speed, referring domains. It reports what changed on the site. It cannot see who changed it, and it never guesses.
The record
What it is.
Once a month we crawl your public pages and compare that crawl to the one before it. Then we write down the differences and send them to you. What changed. When we saw it change. What it looked like before.
Nothing is edited, nothing is published, nothing is fixed. Receipts is the second thing Searchlings sells, and it is the one that keeps its hands in its pockets. The other product does the work; this one only keeps the record of someone else doing it.
The first report is a baseline: the site as it stands, plus the issues we found on the way through. Every report after that answers two questions. What moved since last month, and which of those first issues are still open.
Most of the value is in the boring part. A dated record, kept the same way every month, beats anyone’s recollection of what was agreed in March.
Scope
What it covers, and what it cannot see.
The crawl captures 9 kinds of on-site change. It does not capture everything a person can do for your website, and the second column is the half we would rather you read first.
What the record shows.
- Page titles, meta descriptions and headings
- Page content, and how much of it changed
- Pages added, removed or redirected
- Image alt text
- Structured data
- Canonical tags, robots directives and sitemap membership
- Internal linking
- Page speed, measured the same way each month
- Referring domains
What it cannot see.
- Link building and digital PR, which happen off your site
- Google Business Profile work
- Changes made and then reverted between two monthly crawls
- Pages behind a login, and anything robots.txt excludes
- Research, strategy, briefs and meetings
- Specifications handed to your developer that nobody deployed
Everything in that second column is real work, and a good agency will be doing several of those things in any given month. None of it leaves a mark on a public page, so none of it reaches us. Here is the limit we could have buried and would rather say plainly: a change made on the 5th and reverted on the 25th is invisible to us. We compare two points in time, one month apart, not a live feed. A site could be edited every day and, if it ends the month where it started, our record will say it did not move.
The shape of it
A sample month.
This is the format, not a customer. Every figure below is an example, invented to show the shape of a monthly record. It is not anyone’s real data, and no site is named.
Draft: “Record for July, example site, 214 pages”
- 38 changes detected since the crawl on 1 Jul
- 12 substantive: 5 titles, 3 pages of body copy, 1 added, 2 removed, 1 redirected
- 26 filtered as machine noise: rotating asset names and build timestamps
- 6 of the 14 issues in the baseline audit are still open
- Referring domains 41, up 3 on last month
- Not measured: 4 pages excluded by robots.txt, and 1 that timed out twice
Two habits make this readable. Machine noise is separated from substantive change, so a template that stamps a new build number on 200 pages does not read as 200 edits. And what we could not measure is printed in the report rather than quietly dropped from the total.
The cost
What it costs.
Priced per page, because a 40 page site and a 4,000 page site are not the same crawl. Move the number and the breakdown recalculates.
Not sure? Most small business sites sit between 20 and 200 pages. Scout will count them for you, free.
You would pay
$45 per month
AUD, including GST. Month to month.
That is 1.5% of a $3,000 a month retainer.
| Base, first 25 pages | $19.00 | |
|---|---|---|
| Pages 26 to 100 | 30c each | $22.50 |
| Pages 101 to 120 | 15c each | $3.00 |
Above 10,000 pages we quote, because the crawl stops being a standard one. Send a Scout and we will come back with a number.
The rate tapers. The first 25 pages are the base at $19, and pages after that are charged at a rate that steps down twice as the site grows: 30c, then 15c, then 6c a page. The comparison line in the calculator assumes a $3,000 a month retainer, because a share needs something to be a share of. It is an assumption, not a quote for anything.
Your page count is sticky. It is set by the first crawl, and only re-set when it has moved more than 10 per cent at your anniversary check, in either direction. Publish a few posts, retire a few, and the invoice stays where it is. A price that moves every month is the thing nobody wants a second one of.
Independence
What keeps this independent.
Trust enables the partnership. Verification protects the investment. A report only does the second job if it has no stake in the answer, so here is what we have given up rather than an assurance that we are nice people.
- The report costs the same whatever it finds.
- We never say who made a change, because we cannot see that. We report what changed.
- Every figure links to the stored before and after, so you can check us.
- What we could not measure is printed in the report, not left out of it.
The second line there is the one that matters most, and it is a limit as much as a promise. A page can be edited by an agency, a contractor, a staff member with a CMS login, or a plugin that updated itself overnight. From outside the site, those look identical. We will tell you a title changed on the 12th. Who typed it is a question for the people with the logins.
Honest expectations
When this will show you very little.
Some months the record is short. A settled site that nobody is rebuilding produces a handful of lines, and that is an ordinary outcome rather than a failure of the report or of whoever you are paying.
A quarter spent on link building, digital PR and Google Business Profile work looks almost identical to a quarter spent doing nothing, from where our crawler stands. That is the whole reason the second column above exists. A thin record is not evidence of anything on its own, and anyone who sells it to you as evidence is selling you an argument.
Most months, this should be good news. Titles move for a reason. Baseline issues close, one by one. New pages appear where the plan said they would. A supplier doing careful work comes out of this looking exactly as good as they are, which is why the report is worth forwarding to them rather than keeping in a drawer.
Questions
Questions.
Can you tell me if my agency is doing their job?
No. We report what changed on your website. You draw the conclusion. We cannot see who made a change, and a lot of genuine SEO work never touches your public pages at all: link building, Google Business Profile work, research, briefs and meetings. The record is one input into that judgment, not the judgment itself.
What if nothing changed?
You get a report that says so, with the crawl date and the pages checked. A quiet month is a real outcome, not a fault in the report. It can mean the work was off-site that month, or that the site is settled and nobody wanted to touch it. It is worth asking about rather than acting on.
Will my agency know I am doing this?
Only if you tell them. We read your public pages the way any search engine does, and we contact nobody on your behalf. Plenty of people do tell them, and forward the report each month. A supplier doing careful work usually likes having a dated record of it.
Is this only useful if I distrust my agency?
No, and that is the wrong reason to buy it. Owners get a building inspection on a house they intend to keep. The same logic applies here: a dated record is worth having when the relationship is good, when it changes hands, and when someone asks in 12 months what the last year of invoices actually bought.
Do I need to give you access to my site?
No. We read public pages only, the same ones anyone can load. No logins, no CMS account, no plugin, no code added to your site. That is also the reason pages behind a login, and anything robots.txt excludes, sit outside what we can report on.
How is this different from the managed Searchlings product?
Receipts is read only. It looks, it records, and it changes nothing. The managed product does the work: research, audits, drafting, a pass or reject verdict on every draft, then publishing. People buy Receipts when somebody else is already doing the work and they want a record of it.
What is in the first report?
A baseline. The first crawl describes the site as it stands and lists the issues we found, with nothing yet to compare it against. The second report, a month later, is the first record of change, and it also says how many of those first issues are still open.
What if my site is bigger than that?
Above 10,000 pages we quote rather than price it from a table, because the crawl stops being a standard one. Send a Scout and we will come back with a number.
Start with the baseline.
Give us a web address. Scout will count your pages, take a first look at the site, and send you a short, honest report on how findable you are today. Free, no account needed.
Send a Scout