Compare Mode shows what changed between two audits of the same URL. Change badges appear next to anything that differs — bots newly blocked, metrics that regressed, content that disappeared — so you can see the impact of changes you made without reading through every tab manually.
How to use Compare Mode
- Open any saved report for a URL.
- In the report action strip, find the Compare to dropdown.
- Select a previous report for the same URL as the baseline.
- Change badges appear throughout the report tabs showing what shifted.
- To exit Compare Mode, set the dropdown back to Off.
The baseline can be any earlier report for the same URL — not just the immediately preceding one. This lets you compare against a specific date, such as before and after a site migration or a robots.txt change.
Reading the change badges
Change badges appear inline next to metrics, bots, and checks throughout all report tabs. Each badge shows the direction of change:
- An improvement (grade went up, bot access restored, content gap closed)
- A regression (grade dropped, bot newly blocked, content disappeared)
- A neutral change (value shifted but not in a clearly better or worse direction)
The badge count in each tab header tells you how many items on that tab differ from the baseline at a glance.
Where change badges appear
Compare Mode is active across every tab:
Overview — score change, status change, and which tabs have regressions or improvements.
Crawlability — which bots changed access status since the baseline. A bot that was allowed and is now blocked (or vice versa) shows a change badge.
Content Visibility — changes in render pattern, content coverage, or specific content sections.
Authority — changes in authority grade or which checks passed or failed.
Performance — grade changes for TTFB, CLS, and INP.
Lab — changes in llms.txt presence or the HTML-to-Markdown comparison results.
Typical uses
After making a robots.txt change — compare before and after to confirm the intended bots are now allowed and no unintended bots were affected.
After a site migration or CDN change — compare to spot any new mismatch findings or performance regressions introduced by the infrastructure change.
After a CMS update or content edit — compare to check whether the change affected what bots can read, particularly for pages where content is loaded by JavaScript.
In a monitoring run — when monitoring detects a change, open the flagged report and use Compare Mode with the previous run as the baseline to see exactly what triggered the alert.
Monitoring and Compare Mode
Monitoring automatically re-audits your tracked URLs on a schedule. When a monitoring run detects changes, you can open the report and set the previous monitoring run as the Compare baseline to see a precise diff of what changed between the two runs.