Getting Started

Fixing "Firewall is blocking our crawler" during setup

If site discovery shows a firewall/WAF warning, whitelist the SearchVitals-Bot user agent in your CDN or firewall, then click Retry.

While SearchVitals is discovering a new site, you may see:

Firewall is blocking our crawler — The server returned a WAF or bot-challenge page instead of real HTML.

This means your CDN or firewall (Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc.) is challenging or blocking SearchVitals' crawler before it can even read your homepage.

To fix it:

  1. In your CDN or WAF settings, whitelist the user agent SearchVitals-Bot.
  2. Come back to the setup page and click Retry. You can retry up to twice from this page.

If you'd rather not wait, you can click Add anyway (limited results) — this lets you move forward and look at your website's settings, but audits stay disabled until the firewall issue is actually resolved and you re-trigger discovery. Connecting Google Search Console does not clear this block by itself.

If you'd rather start over, Cancel & delete removes the website entirely.