Platform
How Spy Monk works
One login takes you from a free audit to scheduled monitoring, a single workspace for every mention, and evidence-backed cases that nothing leaves without your approval. Here is the whole journey, with what is available today marked plainly.
Updated By Drive Digital Editorial
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Evidence-based · No guaranteed removals · You approve every external action
Direct answer
How does Spy Monk work?
Spy Monk follows one sequence: create an account, run a free audit that lists which sources it checked and which it could not, set up scheduled monitoring, review every mention in one workspace, and convert an issue into a case with fingerprinted evidence. External steps need an approval record from an authorised team member; outcomes are tracked, never guaranteed.
- Journey: One login → Free audit → Monitor → Mentions workspace → Case → Approval → Track
- Audits, monitoring runs and cases live in one tenant with roles Owner, Admin, Analyst and Viewer
- Every external action (platform report, publisher request, reply, legal escalation) needs an approval record
The journey
Seven steps, one workspace
The SRS describes the customer journey as One Login → Connect Accounts → Free Audit → Discover Problems → Verify Evidence → Receive Resolution Plan → Approve Action → Track Case. In Phase 1 the account-connection step is deferred, and everything else below is live.
Sign in once
Create an account with a one-time code sent to your e-mail or WhatsApp — your choice — or sign in with Google. Turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app; ten single-use recovery codes are shown once and stored hashed.
What you seeWhat you see: your workspace (we call it a tenant), the entities it covers and your team.
Describe who you are protecting
An entity is the person, brand, product, business, website, app or URL you want to understand. Add aliases — spellings, nicknames, Hindi forms — so searches match the way people actually write about you. Plans set how many entities a workspace can hold.
What you seeWhat you see: one card per entity, with its aliases and the audits and projects that reference it.
Run the free audit
Spy Monk queries each source adapter available to it — news today; web search and YouTube when those providers are enabled — then normalises what it finds, removes duplicates by URL, estimates sentiment and risk, and computes the Reputation Health Index. Every adapter reports its own coverage row, so nothing is silently skipped.
What you seeWhat you see: findings grouped by source, a 0–100 score with its explanation lines, and a coverage table that is also printed in the PDF.
Monitor on a schedule
A monitoring project holds keywords and aliases for one entity and runs daily, weekly or monthly according to your plan, or on demand. Each run uses one scan credit; if the workspace has no credits, the run is held and you are told, rather than skipped quietly.
What you seeWhat you see: next run time, last run, new mentions since you last looked, and an alert when a mention is assessed as high risk.
Work the mentions
Every finding from every audit and project lands in one workspace: source, URL, date, excerpt, language, AI-estimated sentiment and risk. Filter, tag, bookmark, mute or archive — archiving hides a mention in Spy Monk and never deletes anything at its source.
What you seeWhat you see: one list, many filters, and a button to convert any mention into a case.
Open a case and preserve evidence
A case is the record for one issue — a review, article, video, post, impersonation or threat. It carries a reference number, a type, a priority, the linked mentions, notes and evidence files. Each file is fingerprinted with SHA-256 at capture so you can show later that it has not changed.
What you seeWhat you see: an eleven-stage pipeline from Detected to Closed with every transition logged — who, when, from which stage to which.
Approve, act, track
Before a case can move from Awaiting Approval to Submitted, an Admin or Owner records an approval naming the action and the target — a publisher request, a platform report, a public reply or a legal escalation. Legal escalation additionally requires professional review, which is why it cannot be submitted in the current version. You send the approved request through the official channel and record the response in Spy Monk.
What you seeWhat you see: approval records, response timeline, outcome — resolved, rejected, escalated — and the verified result.
Design principles
Why the workflow is shaped this way
Three decisions explain most of what you will notice in Spy Monk.
Coverage travels with results. A score without its coverage is a guess dressed as a number. Every audit therefore stores a coverage row per source — covered, unavailable, not connected or demo — and the same table appears on screen, in the PDF and in the API response. If a provider was unreachable, the audit says so and leaves that source out of the score rather than inventing a value.
The model is public and deterministic. The Reputation Health Score combines five dimensions — review quality, public sentiment, issue recurrence and severity, response and resolution, search and brand presence — with published, proposed weights. A dimension without data is left out rather than guessed, and when too little verified data remains Spy Monk shows no number at all: "Not enough verified data to calculate a reliable score". The score methodology sets out every rule. AI only influences the inputs — sentiment and risk — never the arithmetic, so two audits of the same data always agree and trends mean something.
Nothing leaves without a human. Spy Monk has no endpoint that posts to a platform or emails a publisher. It prepares, records and tracks; a person with the right role approves; a person sends. That is slower than a button marked "remove", and it is the reason a request prepared in Spy Monk is credible with the people who decide it.
Product facts
The parts, by the numbers
- case stages, with validated transitions1
- 11
- approval actions: publisher request, platform report, reply, legal escalation1
- 4
- monitoring schedules: daily, weekly, monthly2
- 3
- Health Index range, formula published3
- 0–100
- fingerprint stored with every evidence file1
- SHA-256
- access token / refresh token lifetimes4
- 15 min / 30 d
Sources
- Spy Monk case, approval and evidence model — documented here
- Spy Monk plan definitions — documented here
- Spy Monk Reputation Health Index formula — documented here
- Spy Monk security architecture — documented here
What a first month looks like
A realistic sequence, not a promise
Day 0
Free audit
You run the audit, read the coverage table and the explanation behind your Health Index, and download the PDF. Many customers stop here with a clearer picture and no further action needed.
Day 1
Monitoring project
If you want to keep watching, you create a project with the keywords and aliases that matter and pick a schedule your plan allows. The first run uses a scan credit.
Week 1
First triage
New mentions appear in the workspace. You mute the irrelevant, bookmark the interesting and tag by theme. Most need no action at all.
Week 2
A case, if one is warranted
A review, article or post that deserves a response becomes a case. You attach evidence, write the response or request, and an Admin records the approval before anyone sends anything.
Week 4
Track and report
The response arrives — or does not. You log the outcome, move the case along the pipeline and read the monthly overview: mentions, sentiment distribution, Health Index trend and open cases, each with its coverage caveat.
Availability
Which parts of the journey are live
Labels follow docs/PHASE1-SCOPE.md. Nothing marked Phase 2 or pending is described in the present tense anywhere on this site.
- One-time code by e-mail or WhatsApp, Google sign-in, two-factor authenticationAvailable now
- Entities with aliases; multiple entities per workspace by planAvailable now
- Free preliminary audit with coverage table, Health Index and PDFAvailable now
- Monitoring projects, schedules, scan credits, high-risk alertsAvailable now
- Mentions workspace: filter, tag, bookmark, mute, archive, convert to caseAvailable now
- Cases with evidence fingerprints, approvals and status historyAvailable now
- Connecting your own accounts (Google Business Profile, YouTube first)Phase 2
- Ownership and authorisation verification of connected propertiesPhase 2
- Automation rules (trigger → condition → action)Phase 2
- Guided correction-request and legal-request documents with professional reviewPending feasibilityPhase 3; today the case holds the evidence and the approval record.
- Independent advocate consultations and appointmentsPending feasibilityPhase 4.
- Available now
- Available now6 items
- Phase 2
- Phase 23 items
- Pending feasibility
- Pending feasibility2 items
Questions
Common questions about the workflow
Do I have to pay to see what Spy Monk finds?
No. The free plan includes a preliminary audit for one entity with a monthly scan credit, the coverage table and the PDF. Paid plans add monitoring projects, more credits, case management and team seats — see Pricing.
Does Spy Monk send reports or requests for me?
Not in the current version. Spy Monk prepares the request, records the approval and keeps the timeline. You or your representative send it through the platform's or publisher's own channel and log the response in the case.
What happens if a source is down during an audit?
The adapter records that source as unavailable, the finding list says so, and the Health Index is computed from the sources that were covered. You can re-run the audit later. The refund policy draft sets out the proposed treatment of credits when a run fails on our side.
Can several people work in one account?
Yes. Invite team members by email and assign a role — Owner, Admin, Analyst or Viewer. Only Admins and Owners can record approvals or change billing; seat counts depend on the plan.
Can Spy Monk remove a review, article or search result?
No tool can honestly promise that. Platforms, publishers and search engines decide under their own policies and the law. Spy Monk helps you prepare an evidence-based request and records the decision, whatever it is.
See the workflow with your own name in it
The free audit takes a few minutes and ends with a coverage table, a Health Index and a PDF you can keep.
No card needed