Refusals

The ten things we will not write a report about

Most audit tools will produce a report about anything that answers a request. That is how a domain which is for sale gets a seventy-six point improvement plan. This engine stops instead, and tells you why.

Why refusing matters more than finding

A page that answers 200 OK is not necessarily a website. It can be a domain-parking advert, a security challenge, a builder’s “coming soon” placeholder, an installer waiting to be claimed, or an empty shell that only fills in once JavaScript runs.

Run a checklist against any of those and you get a full report, correctly formatted, entirely about somebody else’s markup. It happened here before it was fixed: thirty-eight findings about a page nobody had looked at, and seventy-six findings about a domain that was for sale. Both reports were internally consistent and completely worthless.

The five that stop the fetch

• The page did not load. An HTTP error is our failure to reach you or your server’s failure to answer. Either way nothing that follows would be evidence about your site.
• It was not a web page. A PDF, an image or a file download at the address given is not something an audit can read.
• It went somewhere else. If the address ends up on a different registrable domain, every check after that is measuring somebody else’s site. Your own platform subdomain does not count as somewhere else.
• It was a bot challenge. Cloudflare and similar can answer 200 OK with a security check instead of the page. Three real florists were once audited as an Imperva block page. The status code alone will not tell you.
• It was an empty shell. Some sites send almost nothing and build the page in the browser. Reading the raw file then produces a long list of things that are missing from a document no visitor ever sees.

The five that stop before the checks

• It forwards to somebody else. A domain pointing at a Facebook page or a marketplace listing has a real problem — the address on the van is doing another company’s marketing — and that one sentence is worth more than a report about the destination would be.
• It is serving an installer. An exposed setup page is an urgent security matter, not a scoring opportunity.
• It is a builder’s placeholder. The default “welcome to your new website” page means the site is not built. There is nothing yet to audit.
• It is a holding page. Same conclusion, different wording.
• It is a parked domain. A page of adverts on a domain for sale is not a business.

What you get instead

A sentence saying which of the above it was, and what would have to change before an audit could say anything useful. No score, because a score invented for a page nobody could read is the most misleading number a report can contain.

The same principle runs through the rest of the engine. Where a check could not complete, the report records that it did not run rather than scoring it as a pass. A security scan that timed out once scored one hundred here, on an empty list of findings, until that was fixed.

The first rung of that ladder is free to use: is there actually a website at that address asks the question this page is about, on any domain you like, without an audit.

The one exception worth knowing

A site behind a challenge can often still be audited — it just cannot be audited silently from an unknown address. If your site refused us, that is usually fixable in a minute by allowing the audit through, and it is worth knowing that it happens at all: whatever refused us is also refusing some proportion of your real visitors.

Questions people ask

My site was refused. Does that mean it is broken?

Not necessarily. The commonest reason is a security product answering for your site instead of your site — which is worth knowing in itself, because the same product turns away some proportion of real visitors and, in one case found this year, was answering search engines with a file that told them to stop crawling the whole site.

Why not produce a report anyway and note the caveat?

Because nobody reads the caveat. A report with a score at the top and a footnote saying the page could not be read will be quoted by the score. The refusal is the finding.

Do you charge for an audit that gets refused?

No. There is nothing to deliver.