FAQ
Quick answers to the questions we hear most.
Why is my changelog empty after the first crawl?
The first crawl is your baseline — there's nothing to compare it against yet. Changes appear from the second crawl onward. Patience, then vigilance.
Will crawling slow down or affect my site?
Very unlikely. SeoSwiftBot fetches about one page per second, one at a time, and backs off if your server asks. It only reads pages — it never submits forms, logs in, or changes anything.
Does the crawler respect robots.txt?
Yes — on every crawl, by default, always. Pages your robots.txt disallows are skipped and shown as robots-blocked, so you always know where they went. More in Meet SeoSwiftBot.
How do I verify a crawler claiming to be SeoSwiftBot is really you?
Check the source, not the label: our crawl IPs (with their reverse-DNS names) are published at seoswift.io/bot/ips.json, and a genuine visit passes forward-confirmed reverse DNS — the IP resolves to a hostname ending in
crawl.seoswift.io, which resolves back to the same IP. Anything else isn't us.Can I slow the crawler down?
Yes — set the site's Crawl speed in its Settings to one request every 3 or 6 seconds instead of the default one per second. Available on every plan; handy for sites with strict rate limits.
Why did my crawl stop at a round number of pages?
Each plan caps pages per crawl: 50 on the trial, 5,000 on Standard, 20,000 on Advanced, 250,000 on Enterprise. A crawl that hits the cap still completes normally — it monitors the first N pages discovered from your homepage outward. If your site is bigger than your cap, a higher tier widens the net.
Why does my page count differ from what I expected?
We count pages reachable by links from your homepage, the way a search engine crawler would. Pages behind logins, forms, or with no inbound links won't appear — though orphan pages that used to be linked show up in the Health tab. Linked files like PDFs are counted separately as assets.
What does "partial crawl" mean?
The crawl couldn't finish — usually because the site rate-limited us hard or went down mid-crawl. We keep your last complete crawl as the basis for comparisons, so a bad day on your server never pollutes your change history.
My site is built with React/Vue — why do pages look empty?
Your metadata is probably rendered by JavaScript, which a plain HTML fetch doesn't execute. Enable JS rendering for the site (Advanced plan and above) and we'll crawl it with a real browser. The Health tab warns you when a site looks like it needs this.
Does SeoSwift work with Google Search Console?
Yes — connect GSC per site from its Settings tab (available on all paid plans). You get click context on changelog rows, Top Pages at Risk, CTR-drop alerts, and Google's own indexing verdicts on the Indexation tab. See Google Search Console.
Why is the Indexation tab's Google data a sample?
Google caps URL Inspection API calls per property per day, for everyone. So we spend that daily budget on a rolling sample of your pages, label every verdict with its freshness, and let coverage build day by day — an honest sample instead of a pretend census. Our own crawl-based indexability census on the same tab covers every page, every crawl.
Can I delete the demo sites?
On the free plan they're your read-only playground and stick around. Once you upgrade, you can delete them like any other site.
Can my clients see their site's data?
Yes — on Advanced and Enterprise plans, enable the client portal on a site and share the private read-only link. No client accounts needed. Enterprise plans can fully white-label the portal with their own logo and colours. See Client Portal & White-label.
Can I export my data?
Yes. The Metadata tab exports to CSV, the Health tab exports your 404s (with the pages linking to them) to CSV, journal entries export as a print-ready branded PDF, and each site has a one-page PDF report. Your change history stays available for as long as you keep the site.
What's the Journal?
One chronological feed of every note across every site — your own dated notes plus the AI-written crawl narratives, each labelled. It's the story of your portfolio in one scroll. See Notes & Journal.
What's llms.txt, and why do you track it?
It's an emerging convention — like robots.txt, but addressed to AI assistants and crawlers. We track it the same way we track robots.txt, so you'll know the moment it appears, changes, or disappears.
How do I cancel?
Settings → Billing → manage subscription. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your billing period, and your data stays put if you come back. No retention dark patterns — we'd rather you stayed because the changelog is useful.
I have a feature idea — where does it go?
The Feature Requests board (in the top navigation). Post it, vote on others, and watch statuses as ideas move from proposal to shipped. The product owner reads everything.
I found a bug — how do I report it?
Click the bug icon in the top bar from any screen. Describe what happened — we capture the page, URL, and browser for you — and you get a reference number plus a status you can track under My bug reports in the user menu. Full walkthrough in Reporting a Bug.
Still stuck? Email hello@seoswift.io — a human reads it.