Conductor customers: Review this lesson in our Community
Why This Guide Exists
Throughout development of the new Pages report, Conductor automatically discovered and included pages from every subdomain it found on your site — a broad net that was intentional at the time, giving the most complete picture possible while the report was still taking shape. That means your account’s data today likely includes more than your team actively manages or cares to report on: staging environments, microsites from past campaigns, admin pages, and more. Going forward, that automatic, discover-everything behavior is going away: new subdomains will need to be manually added and configured. The Beta onboarding period is your opportunity to shape exactly what Pages reporting shows, for both past and future weeks. You’ll define which subdomains and URL patterns belong in scope so that going forward your Pages report reflects the parts of your website your team actually owns and wants to measure. This guide walks you through the decisions you need to make, why they matter, and how to make them with confidence. ⚠️ Configure your subdomains and URL exclusions to get a clean historical baseline. Need more time? Reach out to support through the in-app chat or email [email protected] for an extension. Want to learn about the benefits of the new Pages Reporting? Review our orientation guide ↗️ 🗺️ In this guide:- 📺 Video Walkthrough with Product Manager, Katie Kippenbrock
- The Onboarding Period: What Makes it Different
- Web Properties vs. Pages & Crawling
- How to Think About Scoping
- Step-by-Step: Your Onboarding Checklist
- Next Steps and Support Resources
The Onboarding Period: What Makes It Different
The Beta onboarding period, which is time-limited, will retroactively clean out pages that are not important to your reporting. When you make scoping changes during the onboarding period — removing subdomains, adding exclusion rules — Conductor applies those changes to your historical reporting data as well as going forward. Your trend lines, comparisons, and period-over-period data will reflect only the pages you configure as in-scope, which preserves continuity of historical performance trends by applying your desired Pages configurations. That means your Pages report opens in a clean, stable state from day one, without any pages you’ve deemed as just noise. Once the onboarding period ends, Pages reporting will move into Beta steady state where scoping configuration changes intentionally only affect data going forward — they won’t clean up historical data. This allows you to change the scope of your reporting, when your business needs change, without impacting your historical perspective. Getting your desired report scoping right during onboarding is a high-leverage action you can take to ensure your reporting reflects the parts of your website you really care about measuring. 📋 One timing note: During Onboarding, removing a subdomain will trigger historical cleanup immediately. Setting exclusion rules for specific URL patterns within a subdomain will also remove those pages from history, but those changes will not go into effect until the Beta onboarding period is complete.Web Properties vs. Pages & Crawling: Understanding the Difference
Before you start configuring, it’s worth getting clear on the distinction between two settings areas that are related but serve different purposes. Web Properties (Settings > Web Properties) define what Conductor tracks and collects data for — your keywords, analytics integrations, Google Search Console connections, and AI search tracking. Web Properties are the foundation of how Conductor knows about your website. Pages & Crawling (Settings > Pages & Crawling) controls what appears in new Pages reporting and how crawling works — which subdomains and URL patterns show up, how pages within those subdomains are discovered, and what settings are used to accomplish crawling for technical insights. It’s a pages scoping, discovery and crawling configuration layer on top of your existing Web Properties.
When you add or configure a subdomain in Pages & Crawling, Conductor matches it to your existing Web Property automatically — you’ll see the match confirmed in the setup flow. You’re not creating a new Web Property or replacing any existing configuration; you’re defining the reporting scope for Pages.
How to Think About Scoping
Scoping decisions are ultimately judgment calls — here’s how to approach them. A few things to keep in mind- This isn’t a rulebook. You know your organization best — use the guidance below as a starting point, not a strict checklist.
- Ask one core question for each subdomain: does your team actively manage AEO/SEO and content performance for this part of the site? If yes, keep it in scope. If no, it’s likely noise.
- Use the Pages Used column as your data anchor. A subdomain with a high page count you don’t recognize is worth a closer look; one with only a handful of pages may not be worth keeping, even if it’s technically part of your site.
- Your primary domain and main subdomains where you publish content
- Content subdomains your team optimizes (blog, support, resources, newsroom)
- Subdomains tracked in Web Properties where you have active keyword tracking or analytics data
- Any subdomain you’ll use to make content or technical optimization decisions in Conductor
- Development, staging, and test environments (
dev.,staging.,test.,beta.,qa.) — these generate noise and often reflect content that hasn’t shipped yet - Internal tool subdomains you don’t care to measure (
admin.,app.,portal.,dashboard.), where the audience is employees, not search users - Subdomains with no active or planned SEO or AEO program
- Subdomains you don’t own or control (partner, vendor, or third-party subdomains)
- Functional/transactional pages that don’t receive organic search traffic:
/cart/,/checkout/,/login/,/account/,/thank-you/ - CMS admin paths:
/wp-admin/,/wp-login/ - Paginated or parameter-heavy URL patterns that create noise without adding analytical value
- Internal search results pages (
/search?, ?q=) - Legal and compliance pages where SEO optimization isn’t a priority:
/terms/, /privacy/,/legal/
Step-by-Step: Your Onboarding Checklist
Navigate to Settings > Pages & Crawling to get started. Only Admins can access and make changes here. 📋 If you’re not already a Conductor Monitoring customer, you’ll also want to check Step 6 below — your security team likely needs to allowlist Conductor’s crawlers before technical insights can populate for your pages. 1️⃣ Review Your Current Subdomain List The Subdomains table is your starting point. It shows every subdomain currently included in Pages reporting, along with key context:- Settings Used By — how many web properties and accounts this subdomain affects within your organization
- Pages Used — how many pages were reported on in the latest reporting week for this subdomain (shows how many are currently in scope)
- Crawling — whether active crawling is enabled for this subdomain (turn this off will exclude the subdomain from technical crawling and those pages won’t have technical data for reporting)
Use the Domain filter at the top to organize the list by root domain if you manage multiple domains and want to work through them one at a time.
As you scan the list, ask yourself for each subdomain: Is this a part of our website our organization actively manages for SEO or AEO? Would removing it make our Pages report more focused and relevant?
📋 The Pages Used column and your own knowledge of your website are your guides for making scoping decisions. If you do need help or additional context for setting the right scope for your organization, please reach out to Conductor Support.
2️⃣ Remove Subdomains That Don’t Belong
For any subdomain you’ve decided to remove entirely:
- Find the subdomain in the table
- Click Manage in the Actions column
- Select Remove Subdomain
You can also bulk-remove subdomains using the Select All checkbox: select all, then deselect any subdomains you want to keep, and click Remove to remove the rest.
While the Beta onboarding period is ongoing, removing a subdomain triggers an immediate historical data cleanup — pages from that subdomain will be removed from your historical reporting as well as going forward. This is the cleanest way to descope an entire subdomain.
3️⃣ Add Subdomains That Aren’t Yet Configured
If there’s a subdomain you want in your reporting that isn’t already configured, add it here. Since new subdomains are no longer added to scope automatically, this is also where you’ll come back any time you want to bring a new one into Pages reporting going forward.
4️⃣ Set Exclusion Rules Within Subdomains
If you want to keep a subdomain in scope but exclude specific URL patterns within it:
- Find the subdomain
- Click Manage > URL Sources and Exclusions
- In the Exclude URLs section, add the patterns you want to exclude using robots.txt-style formatting (one pattern per line)
Examples:
/checkout//account//wp-admin//search??sessionid=/page/[0-9]+/
5️⃣ Configure URL Sources Per Subdomain
For each subdomain in scope, you can control how Conductor finds pages to include in reporting. By default all sources are selected for each subdomain, however you can adjust this if desired. Access this via Manage > URL Sources and Exclusions.
Web analytics — pages from your integrated analytics platform (GA4, Adobe, etc.) that have received organic traffic. For most teams, this is your most important source and should stay enabled.
Pages ranking for my tracked keywords — pages Conductor has identified as ranking for keywords you track. Keep this enabled if you have active keyword tracking for this subdomain.
My tracked keywords’ Preferred URLs — pages you’ve manually designated as the preferred URL for tracked keywords. Keep this enabled if you use Preferred URL configuration.
Monitoring pages — available for Conductor Monitoring customers, pages discovered through Monitoring’s site crawl. This option is only available for subdomains you’ve added to Conductor Monitoring. Enabling it gives you the most comprehensive page discovery but also the broadest set of URLs — use your exclusion rules to keep the scope focused.
6️⃣ Review Crawling and Change Tracking Settings
⚠️ Before you continue — allowlist Conductor’s crawlers. If your organization isn’t already a Conductor Monitoring customer, your security team likely needs to allow (“whitelist”) Conductor’s crawlers before technical insights — Indexability, Schema, and more — can start populating for your pages. This is a one-time setup step, and worth doing now as part of onboarding rather than discovering the gap later.
Conductor monitors websites from these IP subnets. If your organization allowlists by IP address, share these with your security team:
89.149.192.96/2781.17.55.192/2723.105.12.64/27173.234.16.0/28
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Conductor Monitoring; +https://whatis.conductor.com)
Skipping this step doesn’t block your report — analytics and Google Search Console data will still appear for your pages — but technical insights won’t populate until your crawlers are allowlisted.
For each subdomain with crawling enabled, you can fine-tune how Conductor crawls it for technical data. Access these via Manage for the relevant subdomain.
Crawling settings cover the monitor location, device type (mobile or desktop), user agent, and crawl speed.
Change Tracking settings control what types of on-page changes Conductor logs in the Changelog tab of Page Details.
The defaults for these settings work well for most sites, but can be adjusted if desired. See our Knowledge Base articlefor more details on these settings.
Set Defaults (top right of the Subdomains page) lets you configure the baseline crawling settings that will be applied to any new subdomains added in the future.
When You’re Done
Once you’ve reviewed your subdomain list, removed what doesn’t belong, adding any missing subdomains, set your exclusion rules, configured your URL sources, and updated any crawling settings you need, you are finished with the onboarding process! All configuration changes will take effect for the next week’s reporting period automatically. Once the onboarding period ends, any pages de-scoped with exclusion rules will be removed from historical weeks as well.
Getting Help
If you’re unsure about a specific subdomain or URL pattern, or if something in the configuration doesn’t look right:- Use in-app chat support (Help > Chat in the left nav)
- Reach out to your Customer Success team directly