Scanning a site

This page explains what happens when you scan a site in Accessibility: the three kinds of scan, how pages are found, how each page is checked, and why some pages end up skipped or failed. To add a site first, see Accessibility.

The same scan also runs the SEO & GEO checks, so a site is crawled once for both modules.

Three ways to scan

Button	Where	What it checks
Scan now	Overview (Accessibility or SEO & GEO)	The whole site: a full scan.
Check a page	Overview (Accessibility or SEO & GEO)	One page, right now. Enter a full address or a path like /pricing.
Recheck page / Recheck N pages	A page report / an issue page	Just those pages, after you fix something.

A full scan is a Full scan in the Scans list. Check a page is a Page check, and a recheck from an issue page is an Issue recheck.

Check a page and the recheck buttons have their own queue, so they never wait behind a full scan. Use them right after a fix.

Scans make no AI calls and cost nothing.

How pages are found

A full scan:

1. Starts at the site’s Start address.
2. Reads the site’s sitemap: the Sitemap: lines in robots.txt, or else /sitemap.xml. Sitemap indexes are followed, up to 10 sitemaps. The sitemap is read fresh on every full scan, and Startica remembers which pages it lists (SEO & GEO uses that for orphan pages and noindex pages in the sitemap).
3. Follows the links on each page it checks, as far as 6 links deep.
4. Stops at the site’s Most pages per scan (250 by default).

Only pages on the same site are followed. A leading www. is ignored, so www.fieldnote.example and fieldnote.example count as one site.

Addresses are tidied before they’re compared, so one page isn’t checked twice:

• The part after # is dropped.
• The query string (everything after ?) is dropped, so /pricing?plan=pro and /pricing?utm_source=newsletter are the same page as /pricing.

Files that aren’t web pages, such as PDFs, images and archives, aren’t opened.

How a page is checked

Each page is opened in a real Chromium browser, the same engine as Chrome. Once it has loaded, Startica runs axe-core 4.14 against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 levels A and AA, plus AAA and best practices if you turned them on in Site settings.

In the same load, the in-page script also collects what search engines and AI systems read: the title, meta description, canonical, robots meta tag, headings, Open Graph tags and JSON-LD blocks, plus the response’s X-Robots-Tag header. Startica checks these for SEO & GEO as each page is stored. The page is loaded once for both modules.

Startica only loads pages. It never clicks, types or submits anything on the site.

Speed

• Two pages at a time.
• At most one page load a second per site, to go easy on the site.
• Roughly 2 to 5 seconds a page. A 250-page site takes about 10 to 20 minutes.

Skipped and failed pages

What happened	Shown as	Why
robots.txt disallows the page	skipped	Follow the site’s robots.txt is ticked.
The page redirects to another site	skipped	Only pages on the site are checked.
The page answers with an HTTP error (400 or higher)	failed (“couldn’t be checked”)	A missing page, a server error, or a page that needs signing in.
The page takes more than 30 seconds to load	failed (“couldn’t be checked”)	A slow or stuck page.

robots.txt applies to full scans. Check a page and the recheck buttons check the pages you ask for.

Skipped and failed pages are listed under Pages with their reason. The Pages checked card on the Overview says how many couldn’t be checked.

While a scan runs

• The status indicator at the top right of every page shows the scan; hover over it for the progress, for example “Running 3 min · 12 of 40 pages”. Click the scan’s name there to open the site’s Overview.
• Scan now shows the same progress and can’t be pressed again until the scan finishes.
• Results appear as each page is checked.

To stop a scan, click Stop scan next to the scan button, or the × in the status indicator. The scan stops after the pages it’s checking at that moment (a few seconds). Pages already checked keep their results, and the scan shows as cancelled in the Scans list. Stop check does the same for Check a page and rechecks.

If you quit Startica in the middle of a scan, the scan continues where it stopped the next time Startica is open. Scans only run while the app is open; see Running in the background.

A scan in which no page could be checked ends as failed, with the reason in the Scans list. See Troubleshooting.

Scheduled scans

Once a site has been scanned, Startica scans it again on its own when the last full scan is older than Scan again automatically in Site settings: every week by default. It checks every hour at 37 minutes past, so if Startica was closed, the scan starts within the hour after you open it. A scan that’s already running or waiting isn’t started twice. Scheduled scans show as scheduled in the Scans list and work like Scan now: every module’s checks run, and an issue tracker opens or closes issues if it’s set to.

After a scan

• Pages a full scan no longer finds are dropped from the results.
• Pages with issues have a new screenshot for the page report; pages without issues have none. See A page report.
• Issues no longer found on any page are marked fixed. See Reading the results.
• The SEO & GEO site checks run (duplicate titles and descriptions, broken links, orphan pages, AI crawlers and llms.txt), using the latest results of every page. They run after Check a page and rechecks too. Startica fetches the site’s robots.txt and llms.txt for them. See When the checks run.

Scanning a local site

You can scan a development copy of your site running on your own computer, for example http://localhost:4000/. Startica normally blocks addresses on your own computer and private network, but allows them when the site’s start address is itself local. Untick Follow the site’s robots.txt if your development server’s robots.txt blocks everything.

Related

• Reading the results
• Site health: the search and AI checks run by the same scan
• Privacy and security: accessibility scans
• Background jobs: the site_scan and site_page_check jobs