Verify your domain

Verifying a domain proves you control it, so nobody else can point the crawler at your site under their own account, and so your dashboard shows "Your search is live" only once a real query has actually arrived from that domain.

You need to verify a domain once, before the first crawl and before the widget will accept queries scoped to it.

Option 1: DNS TXT record

Add the TXT record shown in your dashboard to your domain's DNS, on the domain itself:

docs.example.com.  TXT  "suo-site-verification=Zk3p0aQ9wXr7LmT2vB8nYc4HdE6fJsUa"

DNS changes can take a few minutes to propagate. Click "Check again" once you have added the record — the same button is used everywhere a verification is checked, so there is one consistent place to retry.

Option 2: meta tag

If you cannot change DNS, add a meta tag inside the <head> of your home page:

<meta name="suo-site-verification" content="Zk3p0aQ9wXr7LmT2vB8nYc4HdE6fJsUa" />

suo fetches the root of the domain you are verifying and only accepts the tag inside <head>; a tag in the page body, in a comment or in a script is ignored. The page has to be served by the domain itself: a redirect to another host, including a subdomain, or from https to http, does not count.

Which domains can be verified

A domain name, such as docs.example.com. Case, a trailing dot and non-ASCII names are normalised (Docs.Example.com. and docs.example.com are the same domain, and 例え.jp is stored as xn--r8jz45g.jp). An IP address, a name with no dot, or anything with a port or path is refused. A domain that resolves to a private or otherwise non-public address cannot be verified.

Each account gets 5 verification attempts a minute per domain and 20 a minute across all its domains.

Another account claiming the same domain

Asking for verification instructions for a domain does not reserve it. Every account that asks gets its own token, and the first account to publish its own token wins the domain: when a second account passes the check, the first account's verification is withdrawn and its crawls stop. Nobody can take a domain without being able to change its DNS or its home page.

After verification

Once a domain is verified:

• The crawler will index it.
• The widget will only serve public search results for indexes tied to a verified domain (private and app-content indexes searched with a scoped token are unaffected — see Scoped tokens).
• The dashboard's onboarding flips from a numbered step to "Your search is live" once the first query from that domain arrives.

Re-verification

suo re-checks every verified domain about once a week, with the method you verified with. A check that cannot be answered (a DNS resolver error, or your site being down) changes nothing. If the TXT record or meta tag is gone, crawls keep running for a 14-day grace period, checked daily; if it comes back in that time nothing changes. After 14 days without it the domain becomes unverified, its scheduled and manual crawls stop with domain_unverified, and the index reports why (proof_removed). Add the record or tag back and verify again to resume. Records already indexed stay searchable.