Web Search Alert ownership transfer

Web Search Alerts support two different ways to involve another Tools user: delegation and ownership transfer.

Use delegation when another user should receive enabled result notifications and get read-only access to results and run history while you keep management control. Use Transfer ownership when the other user should take over the alert completely.

Transfer from the web interface

Open one of your own Web Search Alerts and choose Transfer ownership. Search for the new owner by name or email, select an active Tools account from the bounded search results, then enter the alert name exactly as confirmation.

Tools validates the current alert before changing ownership. A transfer is refused when a search run is still pending or running, because that run must finish under the existing owner. A transfer is also refused when the destination user already owns an alert with the same name or when the alert uses an interval that the destination user is not authorized to configure. For example, a sub-60-minute alert can be transferred only to an administrator or a user with the high-frequency Alert permission. Increase the interval first if the intended owner does not have that permission.

After a successful transfer:

• the selected user becomes the canonical alert owner and can edit, run, pause, resume and end it;
• the previous owner immediately loses owner-only management access;
• the alert keeps the same id, configuration, results and completed run history;
• stored result ownership, run ownership and Alert audit ownership move with the alert so the new owner can continue using the existing history;
• an existing delegated result recipient remains configured unless that recipient is the new owner, in which case Tools removes the redundant delegation;
• existing historical notification records remain historical records of the users to whom they were addressed;
• no web search is rerun and no result notification is generated merely because ownership changed.

Tools also refuses a transfer to a disabled account or to the current owner.

API

A user-bound API key with alerts.manage can transfer an alert currently owned by that same Tools user:

POST /api/web-search-alerts/{id}/transfer-ownership

Request body:

{
  "new_owner_user_id": 123
}

The endpoint is deliberately owner-scoped. alerts.manage does not grant temporary cross-user management: the token can transfer only its owner's alert. The same active-run, account, name-conflict and interval-permission checks apply to API transfers. After the transfer succeeds, the old owner's token no longer has management access to that alert. The new owner must use credentials bound to the new owner's Tools account.

Ownership transfer is independently audited with the alert id, previous owner user id, new owner user id and actor identity. Contact details are not copied into the transfer audit context.