SMF·NIGHTWATCH
Can a prompt replace Nightwatch?
SEO & marketing — keyword research, backlinks and rank tracking
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Nightwatch's differentiator is granularity: the same keyword tracked across dozens of cities or postcodes, because a local business ranks differently three miles away. Building the tracker is ordinary work, and the honest problem is multiplication. Twenty keywords across thirty locations is six hundred SERP queries a day, and every one of them is a paid API call. The dashboard is free; the data is the entire cost, and it scales with exactly the dimension that makes the product interesting.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a rank tracker whose primary axis is location rather than keyword.
Projects: a domain plus a keyword set plus a location set. A location is a name, a country, a language, a device, and the location parameter the SERP provider expects (a canonical name, a geo id, or coordinates depending on the provider). Locations are grouped into named sets — "UK cities", "our five branches" — so a project tracks the cross product of keywords and a location set.
Cost, which must be visible before it is spent. Before any schedule is enabled, show the arithmetic plainly: keywords times locations times runs per week equals queries per week, at the provider's rate, equals a figure in currency. Require the user to acknowledge it. Enforce a hard monthly query budget that pauses collection rather than overrunning, and show budget consumed on every screen. This is the single most important feature in the build, because location tracking is where SEO tooling costs get away from people.
Collection: fetch through a commercial SERP API behind a swappable provider module, never by scraping. Stagger requests across the day, retry transient failures with backoff, and record a skip with its reason rather than silently omitting a data point. Store the full raw response so any reported position can be audited later.
Scheduling per keyword-location pair, not per project: a headline keyword in your main city can run daily while the long tail in secondary locations runs weekly. This is the lever that makes the cost tolerable, so make it easy to use in bulk.
The location grid, which is the reason to build this: a matrix with keywords as rows and locations as columns, each cell showing the current position and its movement, colour-scaled. From this one view a keyword strong at home and absent forty miles away is immediately visible. Filters by position band, by movement, and by location group. Clicking a cell opens the full history for that pair with the ranking URL over time.
Also build: a per-location summary (average position, share of keywords in the top ten), URL-change detection with an alert when a different page starts ranking for a tracked pair, and CSV export of the whole grid.
Out of scope: crawling the tracked site, backlink data, keyword volume, competitor keyword research, and client-facing report generation.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the SERP data, which multiplies by every location you add
- B.2 the backlink and competitor datasets bundled alongside
- B.3 the white-label reporting for clients
- B.4 the site audit and the on-page recommendations
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: proprietary web index and data acquisition
Because the subscription is bulk-purchased SERP queries. Tracking twenty keywords in thirty cities costs roughly the same whoever buys the data, and the interface arrives free with theirs.
Questions
Can I import my Nightwatch data?
Keywords and locations export as CSV and import cleanly. Position history exports too and can be loaded as historical data, though without the ranking URLs, so the URL-change detection starts from the day you switch.
What does it actually cost to run?
This is the whole question. At one to three dollars per thousand queries, twenty keywords across thirty locations checked daily is 18,000 queries a month, or 18 to 54 dollars — comparable to the Starter plan and with none of the rest of the toolkit. Weekly checks on the long tail cut that by most of it.
Why not scrape localised results directly?
Because location targeting is exactly where search engines are most aggressive about blocking automation, and the workarounds — proxy pools in each city — cost more than the API does. The prompt rules it out for practical reasons as much as ethical ones.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Everything around the rankings. A tracker with no audit, no backlink data and no client report is a single chart, and the reason people buy a suite is that the position number only means something next to the other three.
Related tools
Receipt