Developer finds his own audit tool reported false findings on its own website
A developer built a local website audit tool that crawls sites in a real browser and generates reports covering accessibility, SEO, security, and broken links. When he tested the tool against its own website, it returned two false findings, incorrectly flagging a sitemap and robots.txt as missing when both files existed and had been recently accessed. The root cause was Vercel's bot mitigation returning HTTP 403 responses to the automated browser, which the tool misread as absent files rather than a blocked request. This prompted the developer to distinguish between 'not found' and 'could not check,' updating the tool to report incomplete results when the entire site refuses the crawler. Additional real-world testing in the first hour revealed further bugs around subdomain handling, silent crawl failures, and unbalanced crawl depth that no internal test fixtures had anticipated.
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