🗺️ Why a Recrawl Is Needed After Architecture Changes
When you make significant changes to your website — such as restructuring your hub-and-spoke architecture, reorganising URL hierarchies, adding new content hubs, or updating internal linking — the Site Auditor retains data from its most recent crawl. Until a new crawl runs, the audit results will reflect your old site structure, not the updated one.
Triggering a fresh recrawl tells the system to re-examine every accessible page on your domain and rebuild its understanding of your site's current architecture, links, and technical health.
🛠️ How to Trigger a Recrawl in Site Auditor
Follow these steps to start a new crawl for your project:
- Log in to your Search Atlas account and navigate to Site Auditor from the left-hand menu.
- Select the project (domain) you want to recrawl from your project list.
- Once inside the project dashboard, locate the option to initiate a new crawl and confirm the action when prompted. The crawl will begin and may take several minutes to complete depending on the size of your site.
- Once finished, your audit results will refresh to reflect your updated site structure, internal links, and technical health data.
💡 Best Practices When Recrawling After Major Changes
- Wait until changes are fully live. Run the recrawl only after all your architecture updates have been published and are accessible to crawlers. Recrawling a half-deployed site will produce mixed results.
- Submit an updated sitemap first. Before triggering the recrawl, submit your refreshed XML sitemap to Google Search Console. This ensures both Google and Site Auditor are working from the same URL set.
- Check your robots.txt. Confirm that no sections of your new architecture are accidentally blocked from crawling before you initiate the audit.
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.