Link Monitor

A broken brand link keeps taking clicks. The destination flips, the page starts returning a 404, the advertiser pulls the offer and the page now sells something else, and nothing about your side of it looks wrong until the conversion graph goes quiet a day or two later.

Link Monitor checks the link on a schedule, follows it to its final destination, and compares the page against the previous check. When the content changed, an AI pass decides whether the change is material: the promotion, bonus, payout or terms, the call to action, the destination or redirect, or the page being down, blocked or erroring. Material changes raise a notification by email, Slack and the bell in Routy. Cosmetic ones get recorded with a score and don't notify anybody.

A monitor watches either a brand link or a URL you paste in, runs from one country, and checks the final URL after redirects, the page content and the HTTP status.

• Checks every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, hourly, every 6 hours, daily or weekly, set per monitor.
• One country per monitor, so the check sees what a visitor in that country sees. Locations are ISO-2 country codes and, for the United States, individual states, 50 of them plus DC. To watch one link from three countries you create three monitors, and monitors on the same brand link are grouped so you see them together.
• Alerts when a monitored link meaningfully changes, breaks with a 404 or another error, starts being blocked by the destination, and again when it recovers. Each alert links straight to the account page. Channels are yours to pick under Settings > Notifications, in the Link Monitor section.
• A change score from 1 to 10 on every change Routy classified, with a one-line description of what changed, kept in the history whether or not it notified you. "Why didn't I hear about that one" has an answer on the row.
• Optional screenshot and page content capture, per monitor. With it on, every detected change stores a PNG of the page and the DOM as it stood, so you can read what the page said at the time rather than taking the summary's word for it.
• A check history per monitor carrying the time, the HTTP status, the country the check ran from, what changed, and the screenshot and DOM when capture was on. Kept for 30 days.
• Statuses that separate a problem with the page from a problem with the check: Active, Paused, Error, Blocked when the target refuses the fetch with a 403 or an anti-bot challenge, and Unreachable on a timeout, a DNS failure or a refused connection.
• Pause, resume, check now and delete from the monitor badge on the Brand Links page, or from the Link Monitors page, which also holds the full list, filtering and bulk actions.

There's no export of monitoring data, so the history is read in the interface and anything you want to keep comes out of the alert and the history row. Capture applies from the next check onward and doesn't backfill earlier ones. Some heavily bot-protected pages stay Blocked whichever country you check from, which is the target's decision rather than something Routy can route around.

Creating a monitor

On Brand Links, the Monitor column shows an "Add Monitor" badge when no monitor exists and a status badge when one does. Click it, name the monitor, pick a check frequency, optionally pick a country and turn on screenshot and page content capture, then save. The Link Monitors page in the sidebar does the same thing from the other direction: Add Monitor there takes either a brand link or a custom URL you paste.

A custom-URL monitor doesn't group under a brand link, so those appear in their own list.

What counts as a change worth telling you about

A check that errors always counts. An HTTP status of 400 or above is recorded as a status change, and a page that couldn't be reached at all is recorded as having become unavailable. Both notify you.

A content change goes through the score gate first. The AI pass reads the text before and against the text after, classifies the change, and scores how big it is as a person would perceive it:

• 1 is imperceptible.
• 5 is clearly visible while the content is nearly the same.
• 7 is text, images or sections moved or reworded with the same offer, deal and headline still reading through. "1+1", "buy one get one free" and "buy 1 get 1 free" all score 7.
• 8 to 10 is reserved for a change where the offer, deal or headline a visitor reads is different, up to 10 for an entirely new page.

A change notifies you when the score reaches 8, or when the category is one of the critical ones (the offer, the destination, or the page being down) even if the visual difference is small, as with a redirect swapped on a page that looks identical. Everything below that is still written to the history with its score, so a run of 4s and 7s on one link tells you the page is busy rather than that the offer moved.

Cookie and consent banners, login and signup modals, rotating promotional carousels, ads and session-specific content are classified as incidental, because they're transient state rather than a real change to the page. Bot-protection and Cloudflare challenge pages aren't reported as content changes either: a check that hits one sets the monitor to Blocked instead of claiming the page changed.

If the classification can't run, Routy records the change and notifies you rather than risk missing one, and the history row says the automatic review wasn't available.

Your own rule for the summary

Switch the change summary on per monitor and each change carries a one-line description of what changed. You can give it a rule of your own in plain language, up to 500 characters, such as "flag only if the offer or payout changed". Leave it empty and a default prompt is used. The summary sends the page content to the configured AI provider and costs tokens, which is why it's a switch per monitor rather than on everywhere.

Checking from a specific country

Each monitor binds to one location and the check runs through a residential proxy there. State-level targeting is US-only. GET /v1/link-monitors/geo-locations returns the picker's list, countries and US states together, with states named in the form "United States, California".

The reason to use it is a programme with geo restrictions, or a destination you suspect of blocking or redirecting by region. A link that's live in the UK and pulled in Germany passes every check you run from the UK, and the German traffic is the traffic you're losing.

What counts against your plan

Link Monitor is a plan feature. Without it, the Link Monitor screens are hidden and the API returns 403.

Your subscription sets how many monitors can be active at once. A paused monitor doesn't count, so pausing one frees a slot. Creating a monitor over the limit, or resuming a paused one while you're at the limit, is refused with "Active link monitor limit reached. Pause or delete a monitor before adding another."

The failure here is a silent one. A 404 doesn't stop clicks arriving, a changed destination doesn't look different from your side, and an offer the advertiser replaced without telling you still converts at some rate, just not the one you built the campaign on. The conversion graph eventually shows it, which is to say it shows it after the traffic has been spent. A check every 15 minutes from the country the campaign targets closes most of that window.

The harder problem is noise, and it's the reason most link monitoring gets switched off. Landing pages change constantly without the offer changing: a banner rotates, a consent dialog appears, a headline gets rewritten into the same promise. A monitor that alerts on any difference gets muted inside a week, and a muted monitor is worse than none, because you think you're covered. Scoring the change and keeping the cosmetic ones in the history without sending them is what keeps the alerts worth opening.

The capture history is for the conversation afterwards. "The page changed on the 14th" is a claim. The screenshot and the page content from either side of the change, with the time and the country stamped on the row, is something you can send to the affiliate programme.