Page selection and cost

A Website Audit is priced per page crawled, with a charge ceiling that rises in bands. That ceiling caps what a crawl can cost, not how many pages you are allowed: no plan caps crawl size. So the two decisions that set both the cost and the usefulness of an audit are how many pages and which ones.

Audits themselves are unlimited on every plan. It is the crawl that costs.

How the cost works

Three things combine:

A per-page rate. Every page the crawl fetches is charged.

A cap that rises in bands. The bands step up at 100, 250, 500 and 750 pages, and the charge for a crawl is the smaller of "pages crawled at the per-page rate" and "the cap for its band". So a large crawl has a known ceiling rather than an open-ended bill.

A floor for very small crawls. The smallest band starts at "up to 100 pages", so a two-page crawl does not pay a hundred pages' worth. The charge is the lesser of the two, which is what makes both ends behave sensibly.

Requesting more than the largest band clamps to that band's rate rather than extrapolating.

The largest crawl RankX AI can run

No plan limits how many pages a Website Audit may crawl. The credit wallet meters every page instead, so the size of a crawl is a spending decision rather than a plan entitlement.

The platform maximum is 2,000 pages per crawl, and that is an infrastructure limit rather than a plan one. A crawl has a time budget it must finish inside, and a request past that ceiling would be started and then killed rather than completed. Stating it is the honest alternative to saying "unlimited" and failing a five thousand page crawl.

For a site larger than that, crawl the section that matters rather than the whole domain. A report on the pages that earn traffic is more useful than a truncated sweep of everything, and the entry points below are how you choose them.

The current figures are on the credit cost reference, which is generated from the product. They are not repeated here, because rates in RankX AI are versioned and republishable and a number typed into prose is wrong the first time one changes.

The single-page and specific-page paths

Two cheaper paths for narrower questions:

A quick check crawls one page. It is the right thing for confirming a fix or checking one important page, and it is the cheapest way to get an answer about a single URL.

Specific pages takes a list you name, with a minimum of ten pages, and it runs a browser rather than a plain fetch. That matters: it sees things a plain crawl structurally cannot, so it can produce verdicts for checks the crawl path leaves not assessed.

The per-page rate on the specific-pages path is higher than the crawl rate, and that is the browser doing the work. It is worth it when you need the checks only it can answer, and not worth it as a cheaper way to crawl a whole site.

Which pages a crawl reaches

The crawl follows your site from its entry points. Two consequences:

A page nothing links to will not be found. An orphan page is invisible to the crawl for the same reason it is close to invisible to a search engine. That is itself a finding, and the sitemap comparison is what surfaces it.

The page count is a limit, not a target. If your site is larger than the count you chose, the crawl stops when it reaches it, and the report describes what it reached.

You can widen what a crawl reaches by giving the Website additional entry points in its settings. That is the right fix for a site whose sections are not linked from the homepage.

A report on forty pages is a report on forty pages

The most important reading rule on this page.

Every per-page figure in an audit is a ratio of pages crawled, not of pages on your site. "12% of pages are missing a meta description" means 12% of what was crawled. If the crawl reached forty of four hundred pages, the report is a sample, and it is a sample chosen by your link structure rather than at random.

Two things follow:

Compare like with like over time. A crawl of 100 pages and a later crawl of 500 are not directly comparable as percentages, because the second reached deeper into the parts of your site nobody links to, which are usually the worse parts.

Site-wide findings are not affected. A missing robots.txt is one site-wide fact and takes its full weight whatever the page count, deliberately. It was previously diluted by page count, which made real findings vanish behind a large crawl.

Choosing a page count

For the first audit on a Website, choose a count that covers your commercial pages and your main content section. You are looking for structural problems, and those show up in the first hundred pages.

For a periodic health check, keep the count the same as last time so the percentages are comparable.

For a site migration or a large rebuild, go as wide as the bands allow once, then return to the smaller regular crawl.

For confirming a fix, use a quick check or specific pages rather than re-crawling everything.

Sitemap analysis

Separately from the crawl, RankX AI compares your sitemap against what it found. That produces the orphan-page finding, broken and redirecting URLs in the sitemap, and the gap between what your sitemap claims and what the crawl reached.

These checks have their own denominator, the sitemap, rather than the page count, for the reason the whole scoring model exists: a sitemap finding measured against pages crawled is a fabricated ratio.

Where to go next

• Running an audit.
• What "a check did not run" means, which explains why the path matters as much as the page count.
• Credit costs, for the current rates.