Always-on audit is a new mode in Site Audit. It constantly crawls your site at a moderate speed, prioritizing important pages and sending email alerts for critical changes and issues.

Before Always-on audit, you could only crawl your website once a week, month, or day on a schedule. If you crawl your site once a week on Fridays, which most of our users do, and an issue arises on Monday, it takes a long time before Site Audit detects and reports it.

With Always-on audit, crawling never stops, and site issues are reported as soon as they are detected. Always-on audit prioritizes pages to recrawl based on their overall importance and other factors: their traffic, internal and external backlinks profile, whether they are indexable or not, if it's a newly discovered page, when a page was last recrawled, and other considerations.

In the Site Audit UI when Always-on audit is running, by default you see the state of your website as of now: what issues it currently has, what new issues appeared today, what issues were resolved, what new pages or links appeared on the site, and so on.

But you can jump back to any day in the past as well and analyze your website data with a new level of granularity. You can track how your website has changed every day in terms of the number of pages added, number of issues spotted and fixed, and how the Health Score of your site changed.

You can explore data for any page on your site as of any day and compare it with any other day. It's now easy to spot when a certain page was added to the site, when a specific issue was introduced and fixed, what pages were added to the site on a certain day, on which pages their content was updated, what pages became non-indexable, what URLs were redirected. Basically, now you can see everything that changed on your site on any day: any data points available in Site Audit can now be tracked on a daily basis.

There's a toggle for Always-on audit in the Site Audit section in the project settings and in the new project wizard. You can enable it in addition to the configured scheduled audits.

Always-on audit complements scheduled audits and fills the gaps between them. Since Always-on audit crawls your site at a rather moderate speed, it relies on fast scheduled crawls to quickly collect primary data about your site. After a scheduled crawl quickly scans your entire website, Always-on audit, which seamlessly starts after it, knows which pages to prioritize and recrawl.

This also means that if you stop Always-on audit and start a new crawl, Site Audit will first run a quick normal crawl to index your website before switching to Always-on audit.

Please note that for now, changing any crawl settings during Always-on audit will take effect only after restarting the crawl. We plan to make some crawl settings adjustable during Always-on audits in the future.

Regarding speed, there are now two speed settings: one for scheduled crawls (same as before), and a new one for Always-on audit. Depending on the current project boost, Always-on audit can constantly crawl your website from 1 to 30 URLs/min. Please note that the Always-on audit speed above 1 URL/min is only available on verified projects.

Unlike usual scheduled crawls, Always-on audits do not consume crawl credits. However, to enable it, you need to boost your project to either Pro or Max boost.

Depending on the project boost chosen, you can crawl your website at different speeds:

Since Always-on audit is monitoring your site 24/7, it's able to notify you via email about critical issues on it in near real-time.

The current logic for sending alerts is simple: you will receive an email if a new page is affected by an error-level issue. To avoid spamming, issues are grouped and sent to you once every half hour.

In upcoming updates, Always-on alerts will be more flexible: you will be able to customize what issues to send and set the notification sensitivity, i.e., how many newly affected pages should trigger an alert email.

You can turn on Always-on alerts when you create a new project on the Site Audit step.

For existing projects, you can enable it in the notification settings. There's a new toggle in addition to the existing option to send email notifications about finished crawls.