Product Features September 29, 2026 By The Askalytics Team 6 min read

AI Sentinel: What It Watches Every Night, and What an Alert Tells You

Conversion tracking breaks during a site update. A campaign keeps spending after its landing page goes down. AI Sentinel looks for these every night, so you do not have to remember to.

The most expensive analytics problems are not the ones you ask about. They are the ones nobody asked about, because nobody knew to look. Conversion tracking breaks during a site update and the dashboard shows a quiet week. A campaign keeps spending after its landing page goes down. Search clicks fall away and the next monthly report is three weeks off.

AI Sentinel is the part of Askalytics that looks for these every night, for every connected website, without being asked.

When It Runs

Every night, with no setup. There is nothing to schedule and no button to press. The AI findings described below run every night on the free trial, Growth and Scale, and once a week, early on Monday (UK time), on Explore. It costs no credits on any plan, and it is included on the free trial and on every plan except Scout.

What It Compares

AI Sentinel compares your most recent complete week with the week before it, for each source separately: Google Analytics 4, Search Console and Google Ads. It waits for each source's data to settle before judging it. Google finishes Search Console data later than Analytics data, and comparing a finished week with an unfinished one would make every week look like a decline.

Across those two weeks it watches traffic (sessions and users), key events and conversions, search impressions and clicks, and ad spend, clicks and cost per conversion.

Two Kinds of Check

Built-in checks come first. These are fixed rules for the breaks that almost always mean something is wrong, not just slow.

  • Sessions dropping to zero
  • Key events dropping to zero, or collapsing
  • Paid conversions dropping to zero while ad spend continues
  • Ad spend dropping to zero on an account that was spending
  • Search clicks dropping to zero
  • A traffic cliff, or a sudden traffic spike

These rules do not use AI and they do not care about your threshold setting. A website that was recording key events last week and is recording none this week gets flagged, full stop.

AI findings come second. An AI reads the same two weeks of numbers and looks for other meaningful changes: search clicks that quietly halved, a cost per conversion that doubled, ad spend that jumped. To stop these becoming noise, each finding is kept only if the change is at least your website's threshold.

The 30% Threshold, and Why

By default, an AI finding is reported when a metric has moved by 30% or more from one week to the next. You can change this for each website in its settings, anywhere from 1% to 100%. The built-in checks are not affected by it.

Why 30? Because an alert nobody reads is worse than no alert. When we tested lower settings against real week-over-week Search Console data, a 20% threshold would have fired on roughly one day in four. That trains people to ignore the alerts, and an ignored alert costs trust as well as attention. A move of 30% is big enough to matter on almost any site, and rare enough that when AI Sentinel speaks, it is worth reading. If your traffic is naturally volatile, raise it. If small changes matter to you, lower it.

See What a Verified Insight Looks Like

Every AI Insight is reviewed by a second AI from a different provider before you see it, and every figure links to the query behind it.

What an Alert Tells You

A finding is not just a red number. Each one contains the following.

  • The metric and the source. For example, sessions in Google Analytics or clicks in Search Console.
  • The before and after values, and the percentage change between them. If the previous week was zero, it says so rather than inventing a percentage.
  • A severity of low, medium or high. Severity takes the size of your site into account. The same percentage drop is rated higher on a site with thousands of visits a day than on one with a handful, so an ordinary quiet week on a small site does not set off the loudest alarm.
  • Likely causes, such as a tracking tag removed in a site update, or a campaign paused.
  • A recommended next step.

Findings are listed with the most serious first, and a short summary tells you whether each source looked stable overall.

Where do you see them? In the app, with a badge in the sidebar when the latest check found something. If you have connected Slack or Microsoft Teams and turned on alerts, a high-severity finding also posts a short message there, so the person who can fix it hears about it where they already work.

What It Is Not

AI Sentinel is not real time. It works from the nightly copy of your data and compares whole weeks, so it is built to catch a break within days, not within the hour. It also works best with history behind it. A change only means something against a previous week, so give a newly connected website a couple of weeks before reading its findings as a trend.

And you do not have to take a finding on faith. The built-in checks are plain rules against your numbers. The AI findings are filtered by your threshold and show their before-and-after values, so you can check the change for yourself.

The Takeaway

You should not have to remember to check whether your tracking still works. AI Sentinel does the checking every night, flags only what clears your threshold, and tells you what changed, by how much, how serious it looks for a site your size, and what to do about it. Read more on the AI Sentinel page, see how the weekly AI Insight complements it, or read how we keep AI honest.

Common Questions

When Does AI Sentinel Run?

Every night, automatically, for every connected website. The AI findings run every night on the free trial, Growth and Scale, and early each Monday on Explore. There is nothing to schedule or configure.

Does AI Sentinel Use My Credits?

No. The nightly checks and the AI findings that follow them cost nothing in credits on any plan. AI Sentinel is included on the free trial and on every plan except Scout.

Can I Change How Sensitive It Is?

Yes. Each website has its own AI Sentinel threshold, set to 30% by default and adjustable from 1% to 100% in the website's settings. AI findings that changed by less than the threshold are left out. The built-in checks, such as conversions dropping to zero, are not affected by the setting.

Which Sources Does It Watch?

The Google sources you have connected: Google Analytics 4, Search Console and Google Ads. It compares the most recent complete week with the week before for each source, covering traffic, key events and conversions, search impressions and clicks, and ad spend and cost per conversion.

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