# Site Audit and crawler

> Run a technical audit, investigate affected pages, links, and images, and verify fixes with a new crawl.

Canonical: https://help.spacebrain.ai/seo/site-audit-and-crawler/

## Prepare a crawl

Confirm the exact host, protocol, crawl scope, authentication or restrictions, and whether staging or private URLs must be excluded. Coordinate with the site owner before a large crawl and avoid testing against infrastructure that cannot support it.

## Read the Site Audit

Open **SEO → Site Audit** after the crawl completes. Start with critical and high-confidence issues, then open the affected inventory. Common categories can include status codes, metadata, headings, canonicalization, indexability, content signals, internal and external links, image attributes, structured data, social metadata, response performance, and security headers.

An issue is not always a defect. A redirect, `noindex`, missing canonical, or blocked resource may be intentional. Inspect representative URLs and understand the template before bulk changes.

## Pages inventory

Use **SEO → Pages** to search or filter crawled URLs and compare status, response, content, metadata, depth, and issue context exposed by the view. Look for patterns by template or directory instead of fixing isolated pages one by one.

## Links inventory

Use **SEO → Links** to investigate link targets, source pages, anchor context, follow state, empty destinations, redirects, and broken responses. Fix the source where practical and verify that intentional mail, telephone, external, or tracking links are not misclassified.

## Images inventory

Use **SEO → Images** for missing alternative text, dimensions, large assets, response failures, external sources, and responsive-delivery signals. Alternative text should describe purpose in context; decorative images should follow the site’s accessibility implementation rather than receiving keyword-stuffed text.

## Validate a fix

1. Record representative affected URLs and baseline counts.
2. Make the change in the owning site or CMS.
3. Test the live response and rendered page.
4. Run a new crawl or the available refresh path.
5. Compare the same scope and configuration.
6. Check for regressions in adjacent templates.

<Callout type="info" title="Crawls are snapshots">
  A cleared issue means the new crawl did not find it within the configured scope. It does not prove search engines have recrawled, indexed, or rewarded the change.
</Callout>