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Verify ownership

Verifying a website proves you control it. Until then it is checked every 5 minutes from one location; after it, your plan's full interval and all its locations are unlocked. Only verified targets can appear on a status page.

You choose one of two methods when you add the monitor, or later from its page.

DNS TXT record

  1. At your DNS provider, add a TXT record named _pulsekeeper-verify in front of your hostname. For example.com the full name is:

    _pulsekeeper-verify.example.com

  2. As its value, paste the token shown in PulseKeeper (it starts with pulsekeeper-verify-).

    Type Name Value
    TXT _pulsekeeper-verify pulsekeeper-verify-… (your token)

  3. Back in PulseKeeper, click Verify.

Tip: DNS changes can take a few minutes to show up. If we cannot see the record yet, try again a little later.

File on your site

  1. Create a file with this name, containing only your token:

    pulsekeeper-verification.txt

  2. Upload it to the root of the site, so that https://your-site/pulsekeeper-verification.txt returns the token with status 200.

  3. Click Verify.

If the site is password protected and you entered the password, we send it when we fetch the file.

A whole domain and its subdomains

You don't need to verify every subdomain. If the main domain is verified with DNS in your account, every subdomain under it, at any depth, is verified too: the ones you monitor now and the ones you add later. A new monitor under a verified domain skips the verification step and is fully monitored from the first check.

To verify a whole domain, go to Settings → Domains, add example.com, put the TXT record it shows at your DNS provider and click Verify. You don't have to monitor example.com itself for this.

Verification works downwards, level by level, and never upwards. With a DNS record on example.com:

Target Verified?
example.com Yes
www.example.com, shop.example.com Yes
api.eu.example.com, v2.api.eu.example.com Yes, every level below
example.net, example-shop.com No, a different domain

A DNS record on a subdomain covers what is below it. With a record on api.example.com:

Target Verified?
api.example.com, v2.api.example.com Yes
example.com, www.example.com No, they are above or beside it

A DNS record verifying a monitored hostname counts the same way: verify api.example.com with DNS on its monitor page and v2.api.example.com is covered too.

Note: Only DNS covers subdomains. A TXT record in the domain shows you control the whole domain; a file only shows you control one server. So a file on example.com verifies example.com and nothing else.

Verification belongs to your account: an agency that verified example.com does not verify it for another account that monitors the same site.

We check the record again every day. If it disappears, we email the owners and admins of the account; you have 7 days to put it back before the subdomains go back to limited monitoring. Targets you verified on their own (with their own record or file) keep their verification.

Sites on platform subdomains

Addresses like yoursite.netlify.app, yourapp.on-forge.com or yourapp.vercel.app belong to the platform, not to you, so verifying one never covers another. Verify each of them with the file method: on Netlify put the file in your publish folder, on Forge in public/. If the site uses your own domain (for example www.example.com pointing to Netlify), verify example.com with DNS instead.

Servers without a website

Targets added by IP address, TCP ports and ping monitors do not need verification: there is nowhere to put a file on a bare IP address. For those, allow our IP addresses in your firewall instead.