Modern websites accumulate technical debt quietly.
Forgotten URLs, outdated test pages, low-value archives, and misconfigured redirects often live unnoticed inside a CMS, slowly draining crawl budget, internal link equity, and indexing efficiency. Traditional SEO audits surface these issues only after a crawl finishes, making it difficult to understand how and why they were discovered in the first place.
Search Atlas introduces real-time crawl monitoring and forensic page analysis, allowing teams to watch a crawl unfold live, identify hidden “cobwebs,” and trace their technical impact at the exact moment they are discovered.
🧠 Live Crawl Logs — See Your Site the Way Crawlers Do
🧠 Live Crawl Logs — See Your Site the Way Crawlers Do
Search Atlas now provides Live Crawl Logs, a real-time record of a site audit as it happens.
During a crawl, the platform surfaces:
Every discovered URL
HTTP status codes (200, 301, 404)
Exact timestamps for each discovery
This live feed removes the black box from technical auditing. Instead of waiting for a crawl to finish, teams can immediately see:
Which sections of the site are being explored
Where crawl budget is being spent
Whether unexpected URLs are being indexed
This is especially valuable for large sites, enterprise environments, and long-lived WordPress installations.
🕸 Identifying “Cobwebs” That Steal Equity
🕸 Identifying “Cobwebs” That Steal Equity
One of the most powerful outcomes of live crawl visibility is the ability to surface forgotten or low-value pages that silently compete with your most important URLs.
Common examples include:
Old test URLs (e.g.
/test,/internal-landing-page-3)Default CMS pages like
/hello-world/Auto-generated date, tag, or archive pages
Thin internal landing pages that were never deprecated
These pages:
Consume crawl budget
Receive internal links
Dilute link equity away from money pages
Increase indexing noise
By exposing these URLs in real time, Search Atlas allows teams to identify and act on technical debt before it compounds further.
🔬 Page Explorer — URL-Level Forensic Analysis
🔬 Page Explorer — URL-Level Forensic Analysis
Every URL surfaced in the live crawl log links directly to Page Explorer, where teams can perform deep, forensic analysis on individual pages.
Page Explorer provides:
Indexability status
HTTPS and protocol resolution
Status code validation
Download and response time metrics
Sitemap inclusion checks
Internal and external link analysis
A key differentiator is incoming internal link visibility.
Because Search Atlas performs a full crawl, it can identify exactly which internal pages link to a given URL—a level of insight that is impossible without crawling the entire site. This makes it easy to diagnose why low-value pages continue to receive authority and how equity flows through the site.
When connected to first-party data sources, Page Explorer can also surface:
Search Console performance
Click-through rates and positions
Analytics-based engagement and revenue signals
This allows teams to prioritize fixes based on technical impact and business value, not just crawl errors.
⚙️ JavaScript Rendering — Crawl Like Googlebot
⚙️ JavaScript Rendering — Crawl Like Googlebot
For modern, JavaScript-heavy sites and single-page applications, Search Atlas includes an optional JavaScript rendering toggle.
When enabled, the crawler processes:
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
This allows the audit to reflect exactly what Googlebot sees, ensuring that client-side rendered content, injected elements, and dynamic changes are fully evaluated.
Important considerations:
JS rendering should only be enabled when needed, as it increases crawl time
It is automatically enabled when required (e.g. pixel-based implementations)
Server-side rendered environments (WordPress plugin or Cloudflare integration) do not require JS rendering, as changes are already present in the initial HTML
This flexibility ensures accurate crawling without unnecessary performance tradeoffs.
Why This Matters for Technical SEO and AI Search
Real-time crawl logs and forensic page analysis are more than convenience features, they are foundational infrastructure for modern SEO.
They allow teams to:
Detect technical debt early
Eliminate crawl waste
Preserve internal link equity
Improve indexing clarity
Reduce noise for search engines and AI systems
In an environment where both search engines and large language models favor clean, structured, and unambiguous sites, understanding how your site is crawled, as it happens, is no longer optional.
Search Atlas turns site auditing from a static report into a live diagnostic system, giving teams the visibility they need to keep websites technically healthy at scale.