If you know someone scanned your pet's tag but no alert arrived, don't worry — this is usually easy to explain, and the scan itself is almost certainly recorded.
Why this happens
Scan alerts are only sent while your pet is marked as missing in the app. Everyday scans — a curious neighbour, your pet sitter, you testing your own tag — are saved to your pet's Locations timeline but deliberately send no notification, so you're not pinged every time someone looks.
Fix: open your pet's profile and tap Lost Mode, then fill in and submit the report. From that moment on, every scan of the tag sends you an alert.
What to check first
- Look in the app's Notifications list. The entry is created before the push is sent, so it appears there even if the push never reached your phone.
- Check your pet's Locations timeline. Every successful scan shows there as "Sighted near {address}", whether or not an alert was sent.
- Check your phone's notification settings. Notifications must be allowed for the Ask A Vet app in your phone's system settings.
- On Android, check the channel. Scan alerts use a dedicated QR Tag Scans channel — "Alerts when your pet's QR tag is scanned". If that channel has been muted in Android's system settings for the Ask A Vet app, no scan alert will appear.
Other explanations
- You were previewing your own tag. Opening the page from your pet's Pet Page screen, or from the review step after reporting your pet lost, never records a scan and never sends an alert. That's on purpose.
- The tag was scanned many times in a row. We allow up to 5 scans a minute, counted both per tag and per person scanning. Scans beyond that aren't processed, so they don't produce extra alerts.
- The tag is deactivated or was deleted. A tag that isn't active doesn't open a pet page at all, so there's nothing to alert you about. Check Settings → Manage QR tags.
- The finder never actually scanned it. If they got an error page instead of your pet's profile, no alert is created — see "A finder scanned my tag and got an error page — what went wrong?".
Please note: Scan alerts are sent as notifications to your phone and to the app's Notifications list. No email is sent for a scan.
If it still doesn't work
If your pet is marked as lost, the tag is active, notifications are allowed, and a scan is visible in the timeline but never reached your phone — contact us and tell us your pet's name and roughly when the scan happened. We can look up the scan and re-send the alert. [CONFIRM: support contact channel and hours for QR tag issues]
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