Claiming a product: verification and the badge

Ownership is proven one of the two ways Search Console uses: a lineofsites-site-verification meta tag on your home page, or a TXT record carrying the same token on the domain. The claim page generates the exact snippet for your domain; add one of the two, then verify. A badge is never accepted as proof of ownership, and ownership alone does not finish the claim. Connecting Search Console is something a claimed product can do afterwards; it is not itself a way to claim.

The free listing that comes with a claim is an exchange: you place our badge on your home page, and the claim's benefits exist while the badge stays up. The badge has to be on the page at the moment you verify. We read it from the same fetch that reads your meta tag, so a claim without the badge does not complete and no claim record is written.

After that our crawler looks for the badge again on every pass. If we stop seeing it, the benefits pause 14 days after the last sighting, so one bad fetch of your site cannot cost you anything. The badge itself carries no number; it links to your product's page here, where the live figures are.

We state this exchange wherever the snippet is offered because undisclosed link-for-listing exchanges are exactly the pattern this site measures elsewhere.

Your product's page shows as claimed, your portfolio gains the domain, the dashboard watches its footprint, your data is yours to export, and you can edit how the product is presented: its name, tagline, icon, website link, screenshots and categories. Claiming never changes a measured value: what the crawler saw stays what the crawler saw, whoever owns the domain, and none of the measured fields are editable by anyone.

The claim itself is not revoked and the domain stays yours. What pauses is the part the badge paid for: editing your product's presentation, the per-directory submission kits, and the competitor comparison. The dashboard says the badge is missing and points back at the snippet.

Monitoring does not pause. Your change feed, your alerts and your CSV export keep working, because those are measurements about a domain you proved you own rather than benefits of the exchange. Putting the badge back restores the rest on the next crawl of your site.

Directory operators claim their listing separately, at claim your listing, with the same meta tag or DNS verification, the same badge requirement and the same grace window. The directory has to be one we already track: claiming does not add a row, and a directory we do not track has to be submitted for review first.

A verified operator may correct four presentation fields: tagline, description, icon and submission URL. Those values are published beside what our crawler read, permanently labeled "operator reported" rather than replacing it. The measured fields, the status, the link attributes, the indexation rate and the listing counts, are not editable at all.