Imagine a tool that automatically crawls your site 24/7, identifies critical issues as soon as they pop up, and sends real-time alerts for your most important pages – helping you fix problems before they impact your rankings.
Meet: Always-on audit.
What is Always-on audit? (AOA)
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 at a moderate speed 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 constantly crawls new and known URLs — 24/7, at a moderate speed.
It’s designed to complement scheduled audits, helping you bridge the gap between them.
Scheduled audits are still your go-to for quickly gathering primary data about your website. Once done, AOA automatically kicks in, using that data to decide which pages to prioritize and recrawl.
That’s why when you stop an Always-on audit and start a new crawl, Site Audit will first run a quick normal crawl to index your website before switching to Always-on 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 break without warning?
Always-on audit keeps a constant watch, so you can catch critical SEO issues early on—with real-time alerts sent as they happen.
For now, you’ll get an email if a new page is hit by an error-level issue. To avoid spam, alerts are grouped and sent every 30 minutes.
Soon enough, you’ll be able to customize the sensitivity level of alerts; more specifically (1) what issues you want to get alerts for and (2) how many it takes to trigger an alert.
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 daily 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 chosen project boost add-on, you can crawl:
- 1 URL/minute (Pro)
- 30 URLs/minute (Max)
You’ll need to verify your project to benefit from speed above 1 URL/minute.
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.
What’s next?
Please note this is our first release, with more features down the road like:
- Customized real-time alerts based on issue severity
- Recrawl any page on demand
- Notification sensitivity settings
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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Excited about Always-on audit? Upgrade your project to a Pro or Max project boost and catch SEO issues instantly.
