Hive Check

Hive Check loads your website like a visitor, before and after consent, and records what your tags send. The report scores the site, lists each problem it found and says how to fix it.

Hive Check is in every plan. It lives under Tools → Hive.

Check a website

1. Open Tools → Hive.
2. Under Check a website, enter the site's address, for example https://example.com. If you leave out https://, it is added for you.
3. Select Run Hive Check or Monitor site.

If your project has authorized URLs, they are offered under From your authorized URLs:. Select one to fill in the address. Authorized URLs are set up for the toolbar.

One-off checks

A one-off check doesn't add the site to Monitored sites and doesn't count towards your plan's limit. Recent one-off checks are listed under Recent one-off checks, with the address, score and when it was checked. Select Site to open the site.

The site page of a one-off check says "This site only had a one-off check. Monitor it to keep its history, add journeys and schedule weekly checks." Select Monitor this site to monitor it.

Monitored sites

Your plan sets how many sites a project can monitor: 3 on Essentials, 10 on Growth and 25 on Enterprise. When you reach the limit, adding a site shows "Your plan lets you monitor 3 sites. Remove a site or upgrade your plan." (with your plan's number).

The Monitored sites table shows each site's Score, Last check and Next check. Next check reads Not scheduled until you schedule weekly checks. Use Report to open the latest report, or Run Hive Check to check the site now.

Select a site to open its page. It has five tabs: Report, History, Journeys, Events mapping and Schedule. The buttons at the top are Hive Setup, Run Hive Check and Remove site.

Removing a site removes its schedule, journeys and event mapping. Past reports stay available from their links.

While a check runs

We run one check at a time, so every site gets a fair, unhurried visit.

• Your check is in the queue shows how many checks are ahead of yours.
• Checking your website shows a progress bar and the page being checked, for example "Checking page 3 of 40…". It shows "Reading your sitemap…" before the pages are chosen.

You can leave the page; the report keeps building. Select Cancel check to stop it.

What Hive checks

Hive only loads public pages, and it never logs in.

Which pages

1. The home page, or the address you entered.
2. Pages from your sitemap. Hive reads the sitemap listed in your robots.txt, then tries /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml. Without a sitemap, it checks the home page and the pages it links to.
3. The pages of your journeys, after the sitemap pages.

Pages are spread across your site's sections, the first part of the path such as /blog or /products. No section takes more than a fifth of the pages at first, so a large blog can't crowd out your product pages. Files such as PDFs, images and spreadsheets are skipped.

Limits

Consent

The home page and two more pages, from different sections, are loaded three times: before anyone makes a choice in your cookie banner, after rejecting, and after accepting. The other pages are loaded once. This is how Hive sees tracking that starts before consent, or carries on after a visitor rejects it.

robots.txt

Hive follows your robots.txt. It identifies itself as MyJourneyAnalyticsHiveCheck, and follows the rules for that name, or the rules for all crawlers when there are none for it. Pages that robots.txt disallows are skipped and listed in the report under Crawl. A missing or unreadable robots.txt allows every page.

If your firewall or bot protection blocks the check, the report says so. To allow it, allow visits whose user agent contains MyJourneyAnalyticsHiveCheck.

Checks that need more

• Events arriving in your project are checked only when the site's address is one of your project's authorized URLs. Hive then compares what the site sent during the check with what your project received from it in the last 7 days.
• Tag manager container checks read your container, so they need a Google Tag Manager connection.
• Identifying users can't be checked, because Hive doesn't log in. Check it yourself on a page where you are logged in.

The checks reference lists every check.

The report

The report opens when the check finishes. On a site page, the Report tab shows the latest one.

Score

The score runs from 0 to 100: 80 or more is shown in green, 50 to 79 in amber, and below 50 in red. Each category has its own score: Tracking, Consent, Tags, Data layer and Server-side tagging.

Each category starts at 100. Each problem takes points off by its severity: 25 for critical, 10 for high, 4 for medium, 1 for low and none for info. A problem found on more pages takes off more, up to twice as much. The overall score weighs the categories:

When the site has no server-side container, the server-side weight is shared among the other categories. Tag manager container and Crawl findings don't change the score.

Below the scores, the report counts the findings by severity, and shows how many are new since last check. It may also show Jenny's summary, a short summary from Jenny, our AI assistant.

Findings

Findings are grouped by category: Tracking, Consent, Tags, Data layer, Server-side tagging, Tag manager container and Crawl. Within each group, the most serious come first.

Each finding shows:

• its severity: Critical, High, Medium, Low or Info;
• New since last check, when the previous check didn't have it;
• its title, how many pages have it, and its rule code;
• what we found, in plain language;
• Show evidence, with the pages, requests, cookies or dataLayer entries behind it.

When a check finds no problems, the report says "No problems found. Your tags look healthy."

Fix a finding

A finding that can be fixed has a button:

After a fix, run Hive Check again to confirm the problem has gone.

Explain

Select Explain and Jenny reads the evidence. She explains the problem in one sentence, says why it matters and lists the steps to fix it. When Hive Setup can make the change, she says so. Select Ask Jenny more to continue in Jenny's side panel.

Explain needs Jenny in your plan. If it isn't, the button says "Jenny is not part of your plan". Other messages you may see:

• "Jenny has used this month's AI budget. Contact us to raise it."
• "Jenny is taking a short break. Try again in a few minutes."
• "An organization admin needs to allow AI data processing in Settings first."

Dismiss

Select Dismiss to hide a finding that doesn't apply to your site. It stays hidden for this site in this and later checks. To see dismissed findings, turn on Show dismissed, and select Show again to restore one.

Tags on your site

This table lists the third-party tags the check saw:

dataLayer events

This table lists the events your pages pushed to the dataLayer: the Event, Times pushed, Pages, the Keys in each push, and Arrived in My Journey, which is Yes, No or Not checked. Select Choose which events to forward to open event mapping.

Download a PDF

Select Make PDF. While it is being made the button reads Making PDF…, then Download PDF downloads it.

Run it again

On a report page, select Run Hive Check again. On a site page, use Run Hive Check at the top.

If a check fails, the report says "This check could not finish" with the reason. A cancelled check says "This check was cancelled". Both offer Run Hive Check again.

History

The History tab on a site page lists every check of the site, newest first:

Select Open report to open a check's report.