Website Audits & Issues

How audits work: crawl checks vs. Search Console checks

Every audit runs two parallel jobs — a full site crawl covering 28 checks, and 2 Search Console checks that require a connected GSC property.

An audit is made up of two independent jobs that run at the same time:

  • Crawl checks (28 checks) — everything SearchVitals can determine by fetching your site directly: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, HTTP status, canonical tags, hreflang, HTTPS/SSL, social tags, crawlability, noindex, bot access, AI crawler access, tech stack, URL structure, caching/compression, CDN, breadcrumbs, crawl depth, JavaScript rendering and errors, PageSpeed Insights, titles/meta/headings, structured data, image alt text and optimization, mobile-friendliness, and GEO checks (robots.txt AI-crawler blocks and llms.txt).
  • Search Console checks (2 checks) — Index Coverage Ratio and Search Console Issues. These require Google Search Console to be connected with a property selected; without it, they show as Locked rather than failing.

If your homepage can't be reached at all during the crawl, the whole audit is marked failed rather than showing partial, misleading results.

You can re-run just the crawl checks or just the Search Console checks independently from a completed audit, without waiting for a full re-crawl.