URL Monitor Review: AppSumo Tool of the Year ($59 LTD)

URL Monitor Wins AppSumo Tool of the Year 2024

URL Monitor has been named one of AppSumo's Tools of the Year for 2024, and honestly, it's well-deserved. This SEO-focused tool tackles a problem that most website owners don't realize they have: getting Google to actually notice your pages.

The core idea is simple. URL Monitor connects to your Google Search Console and automatically pushes your URLs for indexing. Instead of logging into Search Console every time you publish or update a page, URL Monitor handles it in the background. If you've ever published a blog post and wondered why it's not showing up in Google after a week, this is the kind of tool that solves that problem.

Plans and Pricing: What $59 Gets You

URL Monitor is available on AppSumo starting at $59 for lifetime access, which is their tier one plan. That gets you up to five websites and the ability to submit up to 500 pages per day to Google Search Console. For most solo site owners or small portfolio managers, tier one is more than enough.

If you're running an agency or plan to offer indexing as a service to clients, you'll want to look at tier three and above. That's where you unlock white-label dashboards and reports, meaning you can slap your own logo on everything and send branded indexing reports to clients. Tier three supports 2,000 pages per day, and if you need even more, tier four bumps that up to 5,000 pages per day across up to 100 websites.

The tiered pricing works through multiple service accounts, each capable of submitting 200 URLs per day. So your daily limit scales with the number of accounts included in your plan.

Setting Up URL Monitor

Getting started with URL Monitor is straightforward, though there are a few steps involved since the tool relies on Google Search Console under the hood. The first thing you'll do after creating your account is connect it to your Google account. This is required since URL Monitor's entire purpose is to interface with Search Console on your behalf.

One minor quirk worth mentioning: if you're using Safari, the Google authentication flow occasionally grants only partial access on the first attempt. This isn't unique to URL Monitor — it seems to be a browser-specific issue. If it happens to you, just run through the authentication a second time and everything should connect properly.

The URL Monitor Interface

The URL Monitor dashboard is intentionally minimal. Before you connect any sites, there's really not much to see. The main navigation includes your sites list, account settings, email support, an affiliate program link, and their product roadmap.

Account settings are bare-bones — you can essentially just delete your account. Support opens a blank email. It's clear the team put their development effort into the core functionality rather than a flashy UI, which is honestly fine for a tool like this. You're not going to be living inside URL Monitor all day. You set it up, enable auto-indexing, and let it run in the background.

Connecting Google Search Console

If you've never used Google Search Console before, URL Monitor will walk you through the process, but here's the gist. Head to Google Search Console (just search for it — the URL has changed over the years), click "Start Now," and add your website as a new property.

The recommended approach is domain-based verification, which covers all subdomains and protocols automatically. To verify ownership, Google gives you a DNS TXT record that you add to your domain's DNS settings. If you're using Cloudflare, Namecheap, GoDaddy, or any other registrar, just navigate to your DNS records, add a new TXT record with the value Google provides, and hit save. Head back to Search Console, click verify, and you're done.

The important thing to remember is that Google Search Console is completely free. Despite the landing page looking like it wants you to buy something, there's no cost involved. You don't need Google Workspace either — a standard Gmail account works perfectly.

Granting URL Monitor Access to Search Console

Once your site is verified in Google Search Console, you need to grant URL Monitor permission to submit URLs on your behalf. Back in URL Monitor, your newly verified site should appear after clicking refresh. Enable it, and then you'll be prompted to add URL Monitor's service accounts as owners in Search Console.

This is the step that might feel a little uncomfortable. Adding external accounts as "owners" sounds risky, but these are Google Cloud service accounts (you can tell by the gservice email format). They need owner-level access to submit indexing requests through the Search Console API. The realistic risk here is minimal — worst case, if URL Monitor's infrastructure were compromised, someone could mess with your Search Console property, but the chances of that are extremely low.

You'll add each service account email as a new user in Search Console's settings, set the permission level to owner, and save. URL Monitor provides a direct link to the correct settings page, so you don't need to hunt for it. Once all accounts are added, click "Check Status" in URL Monitor and you should see everything marked as active.

Website Details and Auto-Indexing

With everything connected, the real value of URL Monitor kicks in. The first thing you'll want to do is enable auto-indexing. This tells URL Monitor to automatically submit all of your URLs to Google Search Console every day. No manual intervention required.

The site details dashboard shows you a breakdown of your indexing status: how many pages are indexed, how many are in progress, how many aren't indexed, and how many haven't been checked yet. You can also configure email notifications — get a weekly summary every Monday when new pages are indexed, or get immediate alerts when pages are de-indexed by Google.

There's an export button that generates a CSV file of all your indexing data. If you're on tier three or above, reports can be white-labeled for client delivery. You also have the option to manually add specific pages if you don't want to wait for the auto-indexing cycle to pick them up.

Submitting Your Sitemap

There's one critical step that's easy to overlook: submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console. URL Monitor needs Search Console to know about your pages, and the way Search Console discovers them is through your sitemap.

Most content management systems generate an XML sitemap automatically. If you're on WordPress with an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math, it's already there. Ghost, which is what Dave uses, generates one at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Head into Google Search Console, navigate to the Sitemaps section, paste in your sitemap URL, and submit.

Once the sitemap is processed, Search Console will discover all the nested sitemaps within it — typically separate ones for pages, posts, authors, and tags. These URLs then become visible to URL Monitor, which can start submitting them for indexing. Without this step, URL Monitor won't have any URLs to work with.

Why You Should Be Using Google Search Console

Even if you're skeptical about Google's data practices, Search Console is arguably the best product Google makes. Here's why: unlike Google Analytics, which requires you to inject tracking code into your site and essentially hand over detailed visitor behavior data, Search Console works in the opposite direction.

With Search Console, you're telling Google about your content so it can surface your pages in search results. You never install any code on your site. You're not giving away visitor data. Instead, you're asking Google to index and rank your pages — which directly benefits you through organic traffic.

The relationship with Google Analytics is heavily weighted in Google's favor. They get rich behavioral data that powers their ad platform, and you get some analytics in return. With Search Console, the balance shifts. Google benefits by knowing more about what's on the web, but you benefit more by getting your content in front of people who are actively searching for it. That's a trade worth making.

URL Monitor takes this a step further by automating the re-submission process. Every time you update a page or publish something new, URL Monitor ensures Google knows about it without you lifting a finger.

Managing Sites and Archiving

One practical concern with a five-site limit is what happens when you need to swap a site out. URL Monitor handles this with an archive feature. Click the triple-dot menu next to any site and choose archive. That frees up the slot so you can add a new domain.

If you ever need to bring a site back, click "Show Archived" at the top, unarchive the site, re-enable it, and turn auto-indexing back on. It's a minor quirk that you can't re-enable directly from the archive view — you have to unarchive first — but it works well enough. For agencies cycling through clients, this means your five-site limit isn't as rigid as it first appears.

Final Verdict: Is URL Monitor Worth $59?

Within about 24 hours of setup, URL Monitor had already started populating indexing data — 12 pages indexed, one in progress, 18 not yet indexed, and three unchecked. For a site that had never been actively managed in Search Console, that's solid progress with zero manual effort.

At $59 for lifetime access, URL Monitor is a reasonable investment for anyone who wants to take a hands-off approach to Google indexing. It does one thing and does it well. The setup requires a few steps with Google Search Console, but once it's running, you can essentially forget about it.

That said, before pulling the trigger, check whether any SEO tools you're already using offer auto-indexing features. Some all-in-one SEO platforms include this functionality, and you might not need a standalone tool. But if you don't have that covered, URL Monitor fills the gap nicely at a very fair price point.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.