🧭 Overview
Site crawls in Search Atlas usually complete within a few hours, depending on the size of your website. If a crawl has been running for more than 24 hours without finishing, it is likely stuck. This article explains how to cancel a stuck crawl and restart it so your site audit can complete successfully.
⚠️ Signs Your Crawl May Be Stuck
- The crawl progress has not moved for several hours.
- The crawl status still shows as in progress after more than 24 hours.
- No new data or pages have appeared in the audit report.
- The crawl has been running for multiple days with no completion.
🛑 How to Cancel a Stuck Crawl
- In the left sidebar, navigate to your project and open Site Auditor.
- Locate the crawl session that has been running without completing.
- Find the option to cancel or stop the active crawl session — this is typically available alongside the crawl session entry in the auditor interface.
- Confirm the cancellation and wait a few seconds for the status to update before proceeding.
Note: Cancelling a crawl does not delete any previously collected data. Any pages already crawled before cancellation remain available in your audit history.
🔁 How to Restart the Crawl
- Once the previous crawl is cancelled, look for the option to initiate a new crawl session within the Site Auditor for your project.
- Review your crawl settings before confirming — check the crawl scope, crawl limit, and any URL exclusion rules.
- Start the new crawl session and monitor its progress from within the Site Auditor interface.
If you made no changes to your crawl settings, the recrawl will use the same configuration as your previous session.
🛠️ Things to Check Before Restarting
Before you restart the crawl, consider the following adjustments to help prevent it from getting stuck again:
- Reduce the crawl limit if your site has a very large number of pages — crawling a smaller subset can help complete the audit faster.
- Review URL exclusion rules to make sure the crawler is not being caught in redirect loops or crawling unintended sections of your site.
- Check your crawl scope to ensure it is set appropriately for the size of the site you are auditing.
📋 What to Have Ready If You Need Support
If your crawl continues to get stuck after cancelling and restarting, our team can investigate on the backend. Please have the following ready when you reach out:
- Your project name and the URL of the site being crawled
- The approximate date and time the crawl started
- A description of what you see in the Site Auditor (e.g. whether the status appears frozen or unchanged)
- Any error messages displayed in the interface
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.