## **🗺️ Overview**

If you notice domains you do not recognise — such as competitor sites, social platforms like Facebook, or video tools like Loom — appearing in your Site Explorer history, this is expected behaviour. These entries are not errors or security issues. They reflect searches that members of your team have run inside Site Explorer, not sites that were automatically added to your account.

## **📂 Two Types of History in Site Explorer**

Site Explorer records two distinct types of data, and it is important to understand the difference between them:

- **Search activity history** — A log of every domain or URL that any team member has manually searched inside Site Explorer. This includes external sites such as competitor domains, partner websites, or any URL entered into the search bar for research purposes.
- **Crawl data for your own sites** — Metrics and page data gathered from domains you have added to your account for ongoing monitoring. This is separate from the search activity log and only covers sites you explicitly manage.

When you open Site Explorer at **Left sidebar → Site Metrics (Site Explorer)** (URL: **/site-explorer/list**), the history panel displays *all* searches performed by your team — not just searches for your own properties.

## **👥 Why External Domains Appear in Your History**

Any team member with access to Site Explorer can search any domain or URL. Common reasons external sites show up in your history include:

- A team member researched a competitor's domain to review its backlink profile or organic keywords.
- Someone looked up a reference site, such as a content source or industry publication.
- A team member checked a social platform or third-party tool domain as part of a link-building or outreach workflow.
- A colleague searched a client's competitor sites during an audit.

All of these actions are logged under your account's search history because they were performed while signed in to your workspace.

## **🔎 How to Review Who Searched What**

To identify which team member searched a specific domain, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to **Left sidebar → Site Metrics (Site Explorer)**.
2. Locate the domain in question within your search history list.
3. Check the associated timestamp and, if visible, the user attribution column to identify which team member ran the search.
4. Cross-reference with your team's current projects or outreach tasks to confirm the context of the search.

If your account has multiple users, we recommend establishing a brief team guideline on when and why to search external domains, so the history log remains easy to interpret for everyone.

## **⚠️ This Is Not a Security or Crawl Issue**

Seeing an unfamiliar domain in your history does **not** mean:

- An external site has been added to your monitored properties.
- Search Atlas has crawled or indexed that domain on your behalf.
- Your account has been accessed without authorisation.
- Any CMS pages or internal URLs have been auto-generated.

The history log is a read-only record of manual searches. No data from those external searches is applied to your site's reports or monitored dashboards unless you explicitly add that domain as a tracked property.

## **🧹 Managing Your Search History**

If your history log has become cluttered with searches you no longer need, you can clear or remove individual entries directly from the Site Explorer list view. This keeps your workspace tidy without affecting any tracked site data or reports.

## **💡 Best Practices for Teams**

- Brief new team members on the fact that all searches — including competitor research — are logged in the shared history.
- Use consistent naming or labelling conventions when researching multiple client competitors so searches are easy to attribute later.
- Periodically review the history log as a team to ensure it reflects active projects and remove outdated entries.

## **🆘 Need More Help?**

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team.