Platform · document 11

Projects and Ownership

In the workspace: /projects

Availability

Included on every plan, including the free trial

This document is open to every reader on every plan. Availability tells you what a plan includes; it does not decide what you may read.

What it is for

A project is one website, and it is the unit everything else in this platform is scoped to. Ownership verification exists because several instruments here submit instructions to search engines on your behalf, and no platform should do that for a site the requester cannot prove they control. Verification is the step that makes the rest safe rather than a formality.

How to use it

Create the project with the canonical address of the site: the one you want search engines to treat as the real one.
Complete the verification challenge. It proves control of the hostname, which is what the submission instruments require.
Run an audit to confirm the project resolves as you expect before you build schedules or baselines on top of it.

Reading the result

A project is verified or it is not, and the state is shown as a plain badge rather than a percentage. An unverified project can still be audited; what it cannot do is submit anything to a provider on your behalf.

What it cannot tell you

Verification proves control of a hostname at the moment it was checked. It is not a statement about who owns the business, and it does not survive a hostname change: a move to a new domain is a new project.

What it keeps

The project record, its verification state and the audits run against it, for as long as the project exists.