Notifications and alerts hub

Summary#

Everything Metric Vault watches on your behalf reports into one feed. You can read it two ways: the bell icon in the top bar, for a glance without leaving what you are doing, and Notifications & Alerts Hub, a full page with filters. Both show the same items. This article covers what appears there, what the filters do, what Mark all read clears, and why the badge lights again when a new alert arrives.

Purpose#

Automation is only useful if you notice its output. Competitor changes, rank drops and scheduled report runs each live in their own tool, and checking three screens every morning is how people stop checking. The feed collects them so a single glance answers the question "did anything happen while I was away".

It is deliberately an inbox, not a task list. Nothing here needs to be actioned or cleared for the system to keep working.

Requirements#

• A signed-in account. Signed out, the panel reads Sign in to see notifications. and the hub reads Sign in to see your alerts.
• Something to report. The feed is built from work you set up: a monitored URL, a tracked keyword, a schedule, a share link. A new account sees an empty feed because nothing has happened yet, not because something is broken.
• No plan requirement, and no credit cost.

Permissions#

The feed belongs to the account you are signed in as. A teammate has their own feed, built from their own monitored URLs and alerts, and neither of you can see the other's. Switching into a workspace you were invited to does not swap the feed. See What teammates share.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Track & Report → Notifications & Alerts Hub

Or select the bell icon in the top bar from anywhere in the app.

What appears in the feed#

Four kinds of item, from four different parts of the product.

The feed returns the 50 most recent items across all four sources, newest first.

Each row carries a severity label, a relative time, a title and a one-line body.

For the exact title and body wording of every item, see Every notification you can receive.

Step-by-Step Guide#

Read the feed from the bell#

1. Select the bell icon in the top bar. A panel opens under it, headed Notifications.
2. While it loads the panel reads Loading…. With nothing to report it shows All caught up — no new alerts.
3. Rows that arrived since you last opened the panel carry a red dot.
4. Selecting a row opens the thing it is about in a new tab, where there is one: the monitored URL for a competitor change, the public page for a share view.
5. The panel footer reads Alerts from Watchtower, Rank Alerts, and Scheduled Reports.

The bell's red badge counts items newer than the last time you opened the panel. Above 99 it reads 99+. Opening the panel clears the badge after about half a second.

Read the feed in the hub#

1. Go to Track & Report → Notifications & Alerts Hub.
2. The page lists the same items with more room, and adds filter pills.
3. Press Refresh to re-read the feed without reloading the page.
4. Selecting a row opens its link in a new tab, or jumps to the tool that produced it: Competitor Monitor, Rank Alerts or Scheduled Reports.
5. The footer under the list reads Manage which alerts you get in Account › Preferences. and the link takes you straight to the Account screen.

Filter#

The pills sit at the top of the hub. Only one is active at a time, and All is active when the page opens.

Filters run on the items already loaded, so switching between them is instant and never re-queries.

With a filter that matches nothing, the list reads All caught up — no alerts here. That message means "nothing under this filter", not "nothing at all" — check All before concluding the feed is empty.

Mark all read#

Press Mark all read in either the panel or the hub. It clears the unread dots and the bell badge for every item type: competitor changes, rank drops, scheduled runs and share views all count as read from that moment.

What happens behind the scenes#

The feed is assembled fresh each time you open it. Nothing is queued or stored as a notification record; the app reads the underlying tables and builds the list on the spot. Three consequences worth knowing:

• The feed reflects the current state. Delete a monitored URL and its changes stop appearing.
• A source with no data is skipped silently. A brand-new account has none of the underlying tables populated, and the feed is empty rather than failing.
• Your notification preferences are applied when the feed is built. Switching Competitor Alerts off removes competitor changes from both the panel and the hub. Switching SEO Score Alerts off removes rank drops. Scheduled runs and share views have no preference switch and are always shown. See Notification preferences.

Screenshots#

Tips#

• Use the hub for a weekly review and the bell for a daily glance. The hub's filters make "what did my competitors do this fortnight" a two-click question.
• Filter to Competitor before a client call. It is the fastest summary of what moved on their market.
• If the bell is constantly lit and you would rather see competitor changes in Slack than in the app, switch Competitor Alerts off. The changes are still recorded and still visible under the Competitor Monitor tool.
• The relative times are short by design: 45s ago, 12m ago, 3h ago, 2d ago, 1mo ago. Open the source tool for exact timestamps.

Best Practices#

• Treat severity as triage, not as importance. High means the system's confidence that something material changed, and a Low price tweak on a competitor's key page can matter more to you than a High heading change on a blog post.
• Clear the badge deliberately rather than leaving it permanently lit. A badge that is always on stops being information.
• Keep the number of monitored URLs matched to what you will actually read. Thirty URLs on a six-hour interval will fill a 50-item feed on a busy day and push older items out.

Common Mistakes#

• Expecting the hub to be a to-do list. Nothing needs clearing. Items age out after 14 days on their own.
• Reading an empty filtered list as an empty feed. Select All first.
• Expecting Mark all read to silence future alerts. It is housekeeping. The switches in Account preferences control what arrives.
• Expecting the feed to include everything Metric Vault sends. Emails to a recipient you configured on a monitored URL, Slack messages and webhook calls are separate delivery paths and never appear here. See Every notification you can receive.
• Waiting for a notification that a tool run finished. Manual tool runs are not reported in the feed. Only the four item types above are.

Limitations#

• 50 items maximum per load, across all four sources combined.
• A 14-day window on competitor changes, rank drops and scheduled runs. Share views have no window but are capped at ten links.
• Mark all read covers every type: competitor changes are flagged one by one, while rank drops, scheduled runs and share views are marked read up to the moment you press it. Anything that arrives later is counted unread again.
• There is no search, no date filter and no per-source mute inside the hub. Muting is done with the two switches on the Account screen.
• The feed does not update by itself while the page is open. Use Refresh.
• Rank drop and scheduled run rows navigate you to the relevant tool rather than to the specific keyword or schedule.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

What is the difference between the bell and the hub? None, in the data. The bell is a compact panel with an unread badge; the hub is a full page with filters. Both read the same feed.

Do notifications cost credits? No. Reading them is free, and the checks that produce them are run by the background jobs, not against your allowance.

Why does the unread count not go to zero? Because rank drops, scheduled runs and share views are always reported as unread. The bell badge, which compares against the last time you opened the panel, does reach zero; the hub's Unread filter does not.

Can I get these as email or Slack instead? Partly. Competitor changes and rank drops can be delivered to Slack, a webhook or an email address when those channels are stored on the individual item. See Every notification you can receive for exactly which paths exist today.

How long do items stay? 14 days for competitor changes, rank drops and scheduled runs. Share view summaries persist while the share link exists.

Does a teammate see my alerts? No. Each account has its own feed.

Can I turn the bell off entirely? Not the icon itself. Switching off Competitor Alerts and SEO Score Alerts removes the two noisiest sources; scheduled report runs and share views remain.