Verify your domain
Prove you own a domain before suo will crawl it or serve search from it, with a DNS TXT record or a meta tag.
Verifying a domain proves you control it, so nobody else can point the crawler at your site under their own account, and so your dashboard shows "Your search is live" only once a real query has actually arrived from that domain.
You need to verify a domain once, before the first crawl and before the widget will accept queries scoped to it.
Option 1: DNS TXT record
Add the TXT record shown in your dashboard to your domain's DNS:
_suo-verify.docs.example.com. TXT "suo-verify=8f2c1a94b7d3e0f6"DNS changes can take a few minutes to propagate. Click "Check again" once you have added the record — the same button is used everywhere a verification is checked, so there is one consistent place to retry.
Option 2: meta tag
If you cannot change DNS, add a meta tag to your site's <head>:
<meta name="suo-verify" content="8f2c1a94b7d3e0f6" />This only proves control over the specific page it appears on, so suo checks it on the root of the domain you are verifying.
After verification
Once a domain is verified:
- The crawler will index it.
- The widget will only serve public search results for indexes tied to a verified domain (private and app-content indexes searched with a scoped token are unaffected — see Scoped tokens).
- The dashboard's onboarding flips from a numbered step to "Your search is live" once the first query from that domain arrives.
Re-verification
suo occasionally re-checks a verified domain in the background. If a TXT record or meta tag is removed, the domain's status moves to unverified and you get a dashboard notice before anything stops working.