RankNest

Audit Reports & History

Browse the crawl history, track trends across runs, and compare two audits to see what improved or regressed.

Every completed audit is a frozen snapshot of the site on that date, and later crawls never rewrite it. That's what makes history useful: run audits over time and you can prove what changed, when it changed, and whether it helped. The Reports view puts that history to work with a trend strip, a side-by-side comparison of any two runs, and a page-level change log.

If you haven't run an audit yet, start with Running a Site Audit.

Where to find it

  1. Open Issues in the client sidebar and click Run history. The Crawl history page lists every audit run for the client.
  2. Click View Reports in the header. The button appears once the client has at least two completed audits.

The back arrow on the Reports page returns you to Crawl history.

The crawl history list

Each row in Crawl history shows the domain, status, pages crawled, issue count, and date of one run. Click a row to open that run's full audit view: summary cards, table, and page drawers, exactly as they were when it finished.

To remove a run, click the trash icon on its row and confirm. Deleted runs disappear from history and from Reports, so keep the runs you want to compare against later.

The trend strip

The top of the Reports page tracks five metrics across every completed audit, each with a sparkline and a change vs. the previous run:

  • Pages Crawled
  • Total Issues
  • Indexable: the percentage of crawled pages that can be indexed
  • Clicks (30d): Search Console clicks across the crawled pages
  • Avg Position: clicks-weighted average ranking position

Issues trending down and indexable percentage trending up means the technical work is landing.

Comparing two audits

Pick the two runs to compare:

  1. In the comparison picker, choose a Baseline (before) audit and a Compare to (after) audit. Each option shows the run date and page count.
  2. Alternatively, scroll to the All Audits table and click Baseline or Compare on any row.

The comparison computes as soon as both are set.

The change summary

A KPI row summarizes the difference between the two runs:

  • Total Issues Δ: net issue change, labeled Improvement or Regression
  • Issues Resolved and New Issues: issue types that disappeared or appeared
  • Indexable Δ: net change in indexable pages
  • Pages Added / Removed: pages that appeared in or dropped out of the crawl, plus how many changed
  • Status Changes: pages whose HTTP status flipped
  • Clicks Δ (30d) and Position Δ: Search Console movement between the two runs, when GSC data exists for both

Page-level changes

Below the summary, the Page-Level Changes table lists every page that differs between the two runs. Each row shows the URL with change tags, and before → after values for status, indexability, 30-day clicks, and position, plus which issues are new and which were resolved on that page.

Filter with the chips above the table: Added, Removed, Status changed, Indexability flipped, Issues changed, and GSC changed, each showing its match count. The table shows the first 500 matching pages; narrow the filters or export for the full list.

Exporting a comparison

Click Export Changes in the header to download the comparison as a spreadsheet, the summary plus every changed page. It works well as a before/after appendix in a client report.

Snapshots vs. live values

Audit snapshots are read-only history. When a page's live title or meta description has drifted from what an audit recorded (say you shipped new metadata last week), the audit view flags it with an amber dot and a Live now notice rather than editing the snapshot. The current value always lives on the Pages view and the link map; the audit keeps what was true on crawl day.

Tips

  • Compare like with like: two runs with the same Max Pages setting. If the baseline crawled 100 pages and the comparison crawled 500, most "Added" rows are just the wider crawl, not new content.
  • Set the baseline once at the start of an engagement and compare each new run against it to show cumulative progress, not just week-over-week noise.
  • Position Δ counts a decrease as an improvement: position 4 is better than position 9.

Troubleshooting

The View Reports button isn't there. The client has fewer than two completed audits. Run another audit; in-progress and failed runs don't count.

Position Δ shows "No GSC data". One or both runs were crawled without a connected Search Console property, so there's no ranking data to compare. See Google Search Console.

A run is missing from the comparison dropdowns. Only completed runs can be compared. Cancelled or failed runs appear in Crawl history but are excluded here.

Last updated 2026-07-25