Imagine a tool that automatically crawls your site 24/7, identifies critical issues as soon as they pop up, and sends real-time alerts – helping you fix problems before they impact your rankings.
Meet: Always-on audit.
What is Always-on audit?
Always-on audit is a new state for crawling your website in Site Audit.
It’s designed to act as a real-time alerts system, a “safety net” for critical issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.
In short, it constantly crawls your website to catch and report technical SEO issues for your most important pages as quickly as possible – unlike traditional crawlers which report them on a weekly or monthly basis.
How does Always-on audit work?
Always-on audit will crawl new and known URLs non-stop, 24/7, at a moderate speed.
It’s meant to complement scheduled audits, helping you bridge the gap by identifying issues in real time before your next scheduled audit.
If new URLs are found on page, they will be extracted, batched up, and crawled later according to the existing crawl queue and their importance.
In fact, our AhrefsSiteAudit crawler uses several key metrics and signals to determine which pages to crawl and when, like:
- Organic traffic
- Internal and external inlinks
- URL depth
- Indexability status
- IndexNow signals
IndexNow integration
Earlier this year, Ahrefs and Yep (our search engine) integrated with IndexNow – an Internet protocol that instantly notifies participating search engines when changes are made to your website.
This means that once a partner is pinged, all the information is shared with the other partners almost in real-time. This helps Ahrefs in two ways:
1. Proactive crawling: Always-on audits will use IndexNow signals to prioritize crawling important pages, so you can proactively detect critical SEO issues.
2. Faster indexing: All changes detected by our Site Audit will notify the other participants automatically, ensuring your pages are indexed faster across multiple search engines at the same time.
Otherwise, you can still manually submit pages to IndexNow by pasting the IndexNow API key – available under the project settings – into your website’s root directory.
24/7 alerts system
Did a page suddenly become non-indexable? Or a redirect became broken?
With Always-on audit, you’ll have a fresh pair of eyes to proactively respond (not react) to any critical SEO issue, while receiving real-time alerts.
Crawl history changes
Always-on audit also enriches the current crawl history, allowing you to dive deep and analyze data with great granularity in Site Audit.
More specifically, you can track how your website has changed every day in terms of:
- # of pages added
- # of issues spotted and fixed
- The extent of changes undergone by a specific page
Crawl credits usage
Always-on audit is a project boost add-on, hence it does not consume crawl credits.
Depending on the project boost add-on chosen, you can crawl:
- 1 URL/minute (Pro)
- 30 URLs/minute (Max)
If you want to save up on crawl credits, you can always reduce the crawl speed from the project settings. Or as a last resort, put it on pause.
When is Always-on audit coming and what can I expect?
We’re aiming to roll-out Always-on audit by early next year!
Please note this will be the first release, with more features down the road like:
- Customized real-time alerts based on issue severity
- Recrawl any page on demand
And with Always-on audit, Patches, and the IndexNow integration, Ahrefs is set to become the world’s first fully automated site audit tool.
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