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Troubleshooting

A page is missing from the audit​

The most common reasons:

  • It is private or password-protected. These are excluded on purpose - search engines and social platforms can never see them. Make the page public, or remove its password, and it is picked up on the next scan.
  • It is a custom post type or WooCommerce product. The free plugin audits pages and posts; custom post types and products are added by the paid plans.
  • It is excluded from the audit. Re-include it from the Exclusions screen (Manual Exclusions tab), or from the Posts / Pages screen. On paid plans, check whether an exclusion rule matches it.

An archive page is missing from the audit​

The audit covers the blog home / posts page, category, tag and custom taxonomy term archives, and monthly date archives, when the Audit archive pages setting is on. Three kinds are deliberately left out: custom post type archives, author archives, and pagination pages such as /page/2/ (page 1 carries the appearance metadata that matters).

A scan reports an error on some pages​

The plugin audits a page by requesting it on your own server. On some configurations behind aggressive Cloudflare bot protection this self-request can be challenged. The plugin retries and falls back to a direct local fetch; if that also fails it reports an actionable error for those items rather than silently skipping them. A temporary error (such as a timeout) is retried later in the same scan, which helps on shared hosting.

A scheduled scan ran later than the time I set (paid)​

On standard shared hosting, WordPress background tasks run on site visits, so a scan scheduled for 09:00 starts on the first visit after 09:00. On low-traffic sites this can be noticeably later. A server-side cron calling wp-cron.php removes the delay but is never required.

The email report didn't arrive (paid)​

Reports are sent with WordPress's standard mail function. On hosts without proper mail configuration, messages may be delayed, spam-foldered or dropped. An SMTP plugin is recommended for reliable delivery. Send failures are recorded in the plugin log (Settings > Logs).

The "Likely Fallback" image is wrong (paid)​

When a page has no Open Graph image, Enhanced scan predicts which image a platform might use. Social platforms choose fallback images by their own undocumented rules, so this is guidance, not a guarantee.

A search thumbnail looks different to what Google shows​

The Search Appearance thumbnail is indicative. On mobile results Google chooses its own image and may show a different one, or none. Pages with max-image-preview:none correctly show no thumbnail.

The AI access panel says my robots.txt could not be read​

The panel is built from your robots.txt as it is served over your public URL, because that is the version an outside crawler sees - including any rules your CDN injects at the edge. If that request fails or the server answers with an error, the plugin says it could not read the file rather than guess from a view that might be wrong, and the paid AI findings are held back for that scan. Open https://your-site/robots.txt in a browser: if it errors there too, the problem is on the server or in front of it, and fixing that fixes the panel.

The Site row warns that my robots.txt rules are ineffective​

Your robots.txt is answering with HTTP 404 (or 410) while still returning rules in the body. Crawlers treat a missing robots.txt as no restrictions at all, so every rule delivered with a "not found" status does nothing - for search engines and AI crawlers alike. Anything you believe you have blocked is not blocked. The fix is on the server or in whatever generates the file: robots.txt should return HTTP 200.

This warning is in every plan, because a file that cannot work is a plain misconfiguration rather than an AI question.

AI results do not match what I set at my CDN or SEO plugin​

Four things sit outside what any audit run from inside your own site can see:

  • Vendor compliance is documented policy, not proven behaviour. The panel and the findings say "documented to honor" for exactly that reason. One public dispute exists - Cloudflare reported undeclared Perplexity crawlers in 2025, which Perplexity disputes - and the plugin takes no side.
  • Google's Search Console opt-out for AI features leaves no on-page signal. A site can be opted out of AI Overviews with nothing in the HTML or robots.txt to show it.
  • CDN and firewall bot rules are upstream of robots.txt. A crawler can be turned away before your site is asked. When a known CDN is detected, the audit says so as an advisory (paid) rather than claiming to know that CDN's policy.
  • Robots directives served only as HTTP headers (X-Robots-Tag) are not read in this version; the per-page checks read the rendered HTML's meta tags. If you set directives at the server or CDN rather than in the page, check those separately.

Crawler token lists change, and the providers revise them. The list the audit uses is re-checked against each vendor's documentation at every release that touches this feature.

"Possible sources" lists a plugin or theme I'm not sure about​

Source identification is informational - it offers clues about what produced a piece of metadata (an SEO plugin, the theme, and so on), never a definitive attribution.