Site Audit and crawler

The Site Audit and crawler check your website the way a search engine would. They find broken links, missing titles, images without descriptions, and pages that can't be indexed, then turn those problems into a fix list. This guide is for anyone who looks after a website's health. Both tools are free and don't use a paid provider.

Before you begin

• Create your SEO project and make sure the right domain is active. See SEO overview.
• Tell your web host or developer before crawling a large site.
• Know which pages are meant to be hidden from search (for example, thank-you pages). This helps you ignore findings that are intentional.

Where to find it

Open SEO → Audit site:

• Site Audit – your score and a prioritized repair plan.
• Quick Wins – run a crawl and see fast fixes from it.
• Crawled Pages, Crawled Links, Crawled Images – every item the crawler found.

Run a Site Audit

1. Open SEO → Audit site → Site Audit.
2. Select Audit now. The button shows Auditing… while it runs.
3. When it finishes, read the report.

A first audit may be a Homepage audit, which checks only your homepage. Select Run crawler to get a Full site audit with duplicate and orphan page detection, link checks, and page-level repair lists.

Read the report

• Pages measured, High priority, Medium priority, and Checks passed give a quick summary.
• Priority repair plan ranks fixes by impact, how many pages are affected, and effort.
• Audit categories filter the findings, for example metadata, headings, links, or images.
• Crawl diagnostics show HTTP responses, Crawl depth, Indexable pages, Median response, and Broken internal links.
• Open a finding to see Why it matters, Recommended repair, Verify the fix, and Sample affected URLs.
• Select Export report to download it.

Run a crawl

1. Open SEO → Audit site → Quick Wins. With no data yet, you'll see Run a site crawl.
2. Set the crawl options:
   • Page limit – the most pages to scan.
   • Max depth – how many clicks from the homepage to follow.
   • Speed – Gentle, Normal, or Fast. Normal is fast without straining your server. Use Gentle for small or shared hosting.
3. Select Start crawl. You'll see Crawl queued. You can leave this page while Spacebrain works.
4. The status shows Waiting for crawler, then Crawling site. Select Cancel crawl if you picked the wrong settings.
5. When done, you'll see Latest crawl complete with Pages scanned, Healthy pages, Failed pages, Broken links, and Alt text coverage.

If you see Page limit reached, the crawl stopped at your limit. The results are only part of your site. Raise the limit or focus on a section of the site.

Fix Quick Wins

SEO Quick Wins lists fixes backed by the latest crawl. Select Add to workstream on the ones you'll do. You'll see Added to the SEO workstream.

Explore pages, links, and images

Open Crawled Pages, Crawled Links, or Crawled Images. Use Filter results and search to narrow the list, and Crawl snapshot to choose which crawl to look at.

Select Details on a row to open Page details. Values are exactly what the crawler saw. If something is marked Not observed, the crawler didn't see it; Spacebrain doesn't guess.

Check that a fix worked

1. Note a few affected URLs and the current counts.
2. Make the change in your website or website builder.
3. Open the live page to confirm the change is there.
4. Select Run again in Quick Wins, using the same settings as before.
5. Compare the new crawl with the old one in Crawl snapshot, or open SEO → Reports → SEO Progress to see Issues fixed, New issues, and Recurring issues.

Worked example: broken links after a redesign

After a website redesign, Ana's crawl shows 40 Broken links. In Crawled Links, she filters for broken responses and selects View source pages. All 40 come from one old footer menu. She fixes the footer once in her website builder, selects Run again, and the new crawl shows zero broken links. SEO Progress lists the fix under Issues fixed.

If something goes wrong

FAQ

Why does the crawler disagree with Google?

The crawler sees your live site now. Google shows what it saw when it last visited, which may be days old.

Can I start a new crawl while one is running?

Wait until the current crawl is finished or cancelled. Otherwise it's easy to confuse two sets of results.

Is this uptime monitoring?

No. Each crawl is a snapshot. It doesn't watch whether your site is online.

Can I schedule crawls?

Yes. Use SEO → Monitor SEO → SEO Automations and choose Site crawl. Crawl schedules never use a paid provider.

Next step

Connect Google Search Console to see how fixed pages perform in search: Connect search data and providers.