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A check records what the verifier could establish at a stated time. Its result keeps the source, reason and available evidence. Use that record when deciding what to investigate next in your campaign.

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Placement observations

Unknown includes timeouts, rate limits, robots exclusions, challenges, login walls, truncated or partial responses, and pages a plain fetch cannot read. An unknown result is never a removal finding. A missing linking page has its own two-check confirmation and its own event. It is never reported as link removal.

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How a check reads the page

A standard check reads the HTML the publisher’s server sends. Hosted monitoring and the free checker don’t run a browser, so a link added by a script may be missing from that HTML. Pages that need a browser to show their content usually return unknown. Each check records the final URL after redirects, the HTTP status, robots information, a SHA-256 hash of the bytes read, the fetch time and every matching link with its anchor text and relation tokens. The hash lets you confirm that a snapshot is the one the check saw. One check has 20 seconds, up to five redirects and 2 MiB of HTML. A page that exceeds a limit returns unknown rather than a partial answer. Backlink research obeys robots.txt restrictions. A link you added to monitoring can still get a limited fetch under its monitoring policy, and the check records the robots information either way. A linking page that redirects to your destination doesn’t count as a link on that page. The match scope decides what counts as your link. An exact-URL match and a whole-website match answer different questions, so choose the scope when you check a placement. A changed anchor or relation token keeps the link present and records a placement change. Finding a link in the HTML doesn’t show that a reader can see it or that Google indexed the page. Google index status is a separate check.

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Observation and confirmed loss are different

One complete absent observation describes one check. Confirmed placement loss requires two complete absent observations at least thirty minutes apart. Unknown attempts preserve the last known observation and carry uncertainty; they cannot supply the evidence needed for loss confirmation. The local ledger keeps intent and observations separately. Its default CLI exit behavior also preserves unknowns: a successful exit alone does not prove every expected link was found.

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Destination health is independent

Destination checks inspect the exact target URL. Results use healthy, unavailable and unknown, with HTTP status, redirect and timing context where available. A 404 or 410 observation can report unavailable; confirmed unavailable state requires repeated evidence under the thirty-minute rule. A source page can still link to a destination that is unavailable. A healthy destination does not prove that a source page links to it. Consult both placement tools and destination tools when investigating a broken citation.

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Contact and discovery evidence

Published contact extraction reports what saved public HTML explicitly contains. It does not infer an address, check deliverability or establish that a publisher wants your proposal. Source dates and limits travel with the result. See the contacts reference. Imported and discovered rows carry source provenance and coverage limits. A supplier’s observation date is distinct from a verification date. A row missing from an inventory does not prove a link is absent, and a competitor’s placement does not establish your eligibility. Find my backlinks and competitor lookups return the selected index’s records with that index’s dates. A fresh check of the linking page is a separate observation. Saved reports keep the scope and date of the data they used, and reading one doesn’t recheck its pages. Import formats lists which supplier columns carry over. Use the capability status to check which research surface is available, then connect your agent for the relevant hosted tools.

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Download retained evidence

Raw snapshots are readable for 30 days on the Monitor plan. The observation and its history stay after that. Read link history to find the observation identifier, then retrieve its retained evidence. The existing HTTP download route is GET /v1/observations/{observationId}/evidence; destination observations use GET /v1/target-observations/{observationId}/evidence. These routes return an attachment. HTTP setup explains authentication. The shared evidence commands require their matching release. If the download returns 410 EVIDENCE_EXPIRED, retain the observation metadata and record the missing historical bytes. A new check can observe the current page but cannot recreate the old one.

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Inspect and recover evidence

Check a placement to follow a queued job through its observation, then monitor changes over time. Use sync and export for retained snapshots. Troubleshooting covers unknown attempts and expired evidence.