When a Check Fails or Looks Wrong
Most checks finish in seconds. When one cannot, the report says why. Here is what each message means and what to do next.
Error Messages
- "We could not find that website" - the address does not exist. Check the spelling, and whether the site uses www
- "The website took too long to respond" - we wait up to 8 seconds for each request. Try again in a minute; if it keeps happening, the site may be slow for crawlers too
- "The website's security certificate could not be verified" - the HTTPS certificate is missing, expired or for another address
- "The address redirects too many times for us to follow" - the page redirects in a loop or through a long chain of redirects
- "That page does not exist (HTTP 404)" - the page is missing. Check the address, or try your homepage
- "That address is not a web page" - it points at a file such as a PDF or an image. Enter the address of a page instead
- "We cannot scan that address" - it points at a private or restricted network address, which we never fetch
- "You have run a lot of scans in the last hour" - you have reached the hourly limit; the message says how long to wait
Click "Try again" on a failed report to run the check again with the address filled in.
The Site Blocks Our Crawler
If the site answers our crawler with "forbidden", "too many requests" or a similar refusal, you still get a report. The "Page reachable by crawlers" check fails and the checks that need the page's content are marked Not checked. Bot-protection and firewall services often refuse AI crawlers in the same way - if you want to be found, allow the AI crawlers you care about in those settings as well as in robots.txt.
A Score That Looks Too Low
- "Readable without JavaScript" fails - the HTML your server sends has almost no text, because the page is built in the browser. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so they see the same near-empty page. Render the main content on the server
- AI search crawlers are blocked - check robots.txt for an old rule such as "User-agent: * Disallow: /" or a group for one of the AI crawlers
- A noindex - check for a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header set on the page
Still Stuck?
Open a support ticket with the report's link and we will take a look.