---
title: "Expected Body Content — Lemwatch Help"
description: "Assert a substring exists in the response body. 500-char cap. Use for \"page renders\" checks; for richer rules use Money Page Monitor."
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/help/expected-body-content"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Expected Body Content

> Assert a substring exists in the response body. 500-char cap. Use for "page renders" checks; for richer rules use Money Page Monitor.

## Expected Body Content

 A simple way to confirm the page **actually rendered** instead of just returning 200 OK with an empty shell or an error template.

### How it works

- Enter up to 500 characters of plain text

- On every check, LemWatch downloads the response body and looks for the substring

- If the substring is missing , we fire a "content missing" alert with the actual snippet we did receive

### Good examples

 Page — Expected body —

 Marketing home — Start your free trial —

 Pricing — $19/month —

 Status page — All systems operational —

 API health endpoint — "status":"ok" —

 Checkout — Place order —

### Tips

- Pick a string that only appears on the healthy page — avoid common words like "the" or "home"

- Case-sensitive — match the actual rendered casing

- For HTML pages, prefer visible copy over class names (class names change with redeploys)

### When to use Money Page Monitor instead

 For richer assertions — regex, multiple required strings, forbidden strings, JSON path checks — use the [Money Page Monitor](https://lemwatch.com/help/money-pages) custom rules engine. Expected body is the quick single-string version.

### Persistence note

 This field used to silently revert because it was missing from the form schema. Latest build saves it correctly and shows it on edit — see [Advanced Monitoring Fields](https://lemwatch.com/help/advanced-monitoring-fields).


## Related

- [Help centre](https://lemwatch.com/help)
- [Advanced Monitoring Fields](https://lemwatch.com/help/advanced-monitoring-fields)
- [Money Pages](https://lemwatch.com/help/money-pages)
- [Change Detection & Volatility Alerts](https://lemwatch.com/help/change-detection)
- [Acknowledging Incidents](https://lemwatch.com/help/acknowledging-incidents)
- [Set up visual monitoring for a page](https://lemwatch.com/help/visual-monitoring-setup)
- [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing)
- [Exporting Data](https://lemwatch.com/help/exporting-data)