FAQ

Clear answers before you scan.

CrawlVitals is practical AI-retrievability work: find what blocks AI and search from reaching, rendering, indexing, and citing your pages — then fix it and monitor what changes.

Does CrawlVitals guarantee Google indexing?

No. It diagnoses whether pages are technically ready, helps prioritize fixes, and supports submission/discovery workflows. Search engines still decide what to index.

Why only 5 free URLs?

Five URLs are enough to show whether the site has obvious blockers and to demonstrate the report. Paid plans can scan more URLs and monitor changes over time.

My scan only finds one page, or says my site blocked the crawler. Why?

Your site is most likely behind bot protection that challenges automated visitors — for example Cloudflare's Bot Fight Mode, Super Bot Fight Mode, a Managed Challenge, or JS Detections. These serve a JavaScript challenge that a real browser solves but no crawler can, so CrawlVitals (and every other SEO crawler) gets blocked and can't read your sitemap or pages. To scan a protected site, allow our crawler through your CDN or WAF. In Cloudflare that's Security → Bots: turn off Bot Fight Mode / JS Detections, or add a rule that allows our crawler; Security → Events shows exactly which rule challenged the request. Then re-read your sitemap and scan again.

What does “index-ready” mean?

It means the sampled page returned a good response and did not show obvious blockers such as noindex, canonical problems, very thin HTML, severe JavaScript risk, or weak crawl signals.

What is GEO?

GEO means generative engine optimization: making content easier for AI answer systems to understand, summarize, and cite. CrawlVitals checks entity clarity, answerable content, source signals, structured data, and trust signals.

What is agent readiness?

Agent readiness checks whether a site exposes clean machine-readable signals such as semantic HTML, structured data, crawler policy, visible initial content, and llms.txt.

Can this fix my site automatically?

The scanner does not directly rewrite your site. It generates prioritized issues and a copy-ready AI fix prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, or your developer workflow.

Why connect Google Search Console?

Search Console is the cleanest way to inspect URLs you own, monitor indexing states, and see whether pages are discovered, crawled, indexed, excluded, or canonicalized.

Why include Bing and IndexNow?

Bing and IndexNow provide legitimate URL notification workflows. They help search engines discover new, updated, or deleted URLs faster, but they still do not guarantee indexing or ranking.

I connected Bing but there's no data. Why?

Connecting Bing only grants CrawlVitals read access to your Bing Webmaster account — it doesn't add your site. If you see no data, the site usually isn't added and verified in Bing Webmaster Tools yet. Add it at bing.com/webmasters (the fastest way is to import it directly from Google Search Console), then submit it via IndexNow so Bing crawls it. Even after that, Bing performance numbers only appear once Bing has indexed your pages and they start getting impressions — which takes days to weeks for a new site. Empty Bing data on a new site is normal, not a fault.

Who is this for?

Programmatic SEO sites, ecommerce stores, directories, SaaS landing-page libraries, agencies, content sites, and anyone publishing many pages that need indexability monitoring.

Does CrawlVitals include IndexNow?

Yes. It can generate an IndexNow key, verify the key file on the customer's domain, submit index-ready URLs, and log the response. The WordPress plugin can serve the key file automatically.

Can it show when my pages got indexed?

After Search Console is connected, CrawlVitals records when each URL was submitted and when Search Console first reports it indexed, and shows that as a per-site indexing timeline. It intentionally doesn't headline a single 'time to index' number, because your submission date isn't necessarily when Google first discovered the page.

Does the scanner improve over time?

Yes. CrawlVitals includes a signal rules library so SEO, GEO, AI search, IndexNow, and agent-readiness rules can be updated as new standards and search behavior change.

Does the research watcher update automatically?

Yes for high-trust sources that are explicitly marked as safe to auto-apply. Medium and low-trust sources create review proposals instead of silently changing scanner behavior.

Are there free tools?

Yes. CrawlVitals includes free tools for index readiness, render visibility, metadata, schema, robots.txt, sitemaps, headers, redirects, llms.txt, and AI crawler access.

What is Standard Push?

Standard Push audits URLs, rejects blocked pages, submits eligible owned URLs through supported channels, and monitors status on a normal cadence.

What is Managed Push?

Managed Push is the hands-off, automated tier. We automatically submit your new and changed pages to the IndexNow engines, audit each page so only ready ones go out, monitor them on a tighter cadence, and alert you to pages that stall — with the likely fix. It doesn't make Google index faster or guarantee indexing; it automates and watches the legitimate submission channels so you don't have to.

Can CrawlVitals force third-party backlinks to index?

No. Backlink Visibility Monitor checks public crawlability, noindex, canonical, link presence, and index-status signals. It does not bypass ownership or platform controls.