Notifications & Alerts: Know When Something Changes, Ignore When It Doesn’t
You don’t need to know that rankings held steady this week. You don’t need a notification every time a 5-star review comes in. You don’t need a daily ping confirming nothing happened.
You need to know when a 1-star review drops. When rankings degrade by 2+ positions. When someone edits your client’s GBP categories without authorization. When AI visibility disappears from a platform that was citing the business last month.
The notification system surfaces actionable changes and stays quiet the rest of the time. Configurable thresholds per client, delivered to Slack or email, formatted for 30-second comprehension.
Six Notification Types
Task Complete — summary notification when autonomous tasks finish. Not an alert — just a record that the scan ran and where to find results.
📊 Weekly Report — Keystone Buffalo
Rankings stable. 1 new finding.
ARP: 7.6 (↑ from 8.2) | SoLV: 58% (↑ from 51%)
⚠️ 1-star review from yesterday — no response yet
→ Full report: scans/2026-04-07-geogrid.mdApproval Request — draft content ready for human review. Includes preview and action buttons.
✍️ Approval Required — GBP Posts — Keystone Buffalo
4 posts drafted for April. Ready to schedule.
Preview: drafts/2026-04-01-gbp-posts.md
Reply APPROVE to publish | REJECT to discard | EDIT [notes] to revise
Expires: 2026-04-09Pre-execution Confirm — high-stakes action awaiting explicit go-ahead before proceeding.
Post-execution Confirm — confirmation that a Tier 3 action completed successfully. Sent to both agency and client.
Alert — monitoring threshold crossed. Urgent. Requires attention.
🚨 Ranking Alert — Valley Plumbing Phoenix
ARP degraded from 4.3 to 5.1 (0.8 positions)
SoLV dropped from 55% to 42%
→ Full scan: scans/2026-04-07-geogrid.mdFailure — a task ran but encountered errors. Logged for review.
❌ Task Failed — m1-rankings-monitor — Smith's HVAC Dallas
LocalSEOData geogrid_scan returned timeout.
Partial data available. Brief flagged for manual review.
→ See: scans/2026-04-07-geogrid.mdAlert Thresholds — Tuned Per Client
Every client’s brand brief includes configurable alert thresholds:
| Threshold | Default | What It Watches |
|---|---|---|
low_rating_threshold | 3 stars | Alert on reviews at or below this rating |
new_one_star | Always | 1-star reviews always trigger an alert |
review_velocity_drop_pct | 40% | Weekly review volume drops this percentage |
arp_degradation_positions | 2 | ARP worsens by this many positions |
solv_drop_points | 10 | SoLV drops by this many percentage points |
gbp_change | true | Any unauthorized GBP edit detected |
lsa_rank_drop_positions | 3 | LSA rank drops this many positions |
ai_visibility_drop_points | 15 | AI visibility score drops this many points |
Three Preset Configurations
High-touch — aggressive alerting for active campaigns. Lower thresholds, more notifications. Use during the first 90 days of a new engagement or when actively optimizing.
Standard — maintenance mode. Selective alerts for meaningful changes. Use for established clients with stable rankings.
Minimal — quarterly monitoring with loose thresholds. Use for clients on retainer with minimal active work.
You can use a preset and override individual thresholds. A standard-mode client who’s sensitive about reviews might get low_rating_threshold: 4 while keeping everything else at standard defaults.
Client-Facing vs. Agency Notifications
The system separates internal and external communication:
Agency/practitioner notifications go to Slack. Concise, actionable, with file paths to detailed outputs. Written for SEO professionals who know what ARP means.
Client notifications go to email. Professional, jargon-free, with executive summaries. No mentions of “Claude,” “AI,” or internal tooling unless the client knows and has agreed.
A client email looks like:
Subject: Keystone Insurance — Monthly Performance — April 2026
Your local search performance improved this month.
Key metrics:
Visibility score: 58% (up from 51%)
Average ranking: 7.6 (improved from 8.2)
New reviews: 4 (all positive)
Citations corrected: 3
Top win: Rankings improved across 6 of 7 tracked areas.
Recommended next step: Launch review generation campaign to
build on momentum.
Full details are available in your monthly report.No jargon. No raw data. Written for a business owner who spends 30 seconds reading it.
How Notifications Connect to Tasks, Briefs, and Approvals
Every notification originates from a task execution or monitoring event. The task runs, produces an output, evaluates alert thresholds, and triggers the appropriate notification type.
The notification includes a file path to the full output. The brief gets a session log entry. The deliverables section tracks approval status. Everything cross-references — you can trace any notification back to the task that generated it and the brief that recorded it.
No notification fires without a corresponding output file. No alert fires without a threshold crossing. The system doesn’t generate noise — it generates signals.
Skill Documentation
For technical details on notification formats, Slack/email configuration, alert threshold tuning, and delivery specifications, see the full notification format documentation.