Reading your first audit results

Starting a crawl

From your project dashboard, click Run audit (or Start crawl if this is your first one). The crawl begins immediately — you’ll see a progress indicator showing pages discovered, fetched, and processed.

For a typical site of a few hundred pages, a crawl takes 2–10 minutes. Large sites (10,000+ pages) can take longer depending on your crawl configuration and server response times.

You don’t need to stay on the page — the crawl runs in the background and you’ll see the results when you return.

What the crawler does

For every page it discovers, the crawler:

1. Fetches the raw HTML response and records status code, headers, redirect chains, and metadata.
2. If the page requires JavaScript rendering (based on your crawl settings or detected need), fetches a rendered version via a headless browser.
3. Compares raw and rendered versions to detect parity gaps.
4. Runs all applicable audit checks against the page data.
5. Checks robots.txt directives for each configured user-agent.
6. Extracts and follows internal links to build the full crawl graph.

Reading the results

Once the crawl completes, you’ll land on the Audit overview page. This shows:

• Issues by severity — Critical, High, Medium, Low, and Info counts. Start with Critical.
• Pages crawled — total URLs discovered and successfully fetched.
• Coverage — percentage of the site reached in this crawl.

Drilling into a finding

Click any issue in the list to open its detail panel. Every finding shows:

• What’s wrong — a plain-language summary.
• Why it matters — the business and SEO impact.
• Where — the URL(s) affected. Template-scoped findings show the template pattern and all pages matching it.
• Evidence — the raw data that triggered the finding (e.g., the conflicting canonical tags, the robots.txt directive that blocks the bot, the diff between raw and rendered metadata).
• Fix steps — ordered, concrete steps to resolve the issue.
• Suggested fix — when applicable, the exact value to apply (e.g., the corrected canonical tag, the robots.txt rule to add).
• Generated file — when the fix is a file (robots.txt, llms.txt, JSON-LD block, etc.), we generate the complete, corrected file ready to download.

Severity levels

Severity	What it means
Critical	Blocks indexation, causes deindexation, or breaks the site for crawlers
High	Significantly harms crawlability, ranking, or AI visibility for important pages
Medium	Degrades performance or misses an optimization opportunity
Low	Minor optimization or informational finding
Info	Observation only — no action required, but useful context

Template vs page-level findings

When the same defect appears on many pages that share a template, VisibilityIQ surfaces it as a template-level finding rather than hundreds of individual page findings. This tells you to fix the template once rather than each page individually.

The finding detail shows both the template pattern and the set of pages affected, so you know the full blast radius before you make a change.

After the first audit

• Address Critical and High findings first — these have the highest SEO impact.
• Connect Google Search Console to see which pages Google has indexed and how they’re performing in search.
• Re-run the audit after making fixes to verify issues are resolved. Fixed issues move to Fixed status; issues that return are marked Regressed.