How do I exclude paths from audits?

Most sites have URLs you don't want in your SEO audit: admin areas, cart and checkout flows, account pages, internal search results and parameter-heavy listing pages. Excluding them keeps the audit fast and the score meaningful.

Where to set exclusions

Go to Settings → Crawl → URL exclusion patterns. The field accepts a comma-separated list of substrings or regex patterns. Plain strings work as "contains" matches; wrap in slashes for regex.

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/wp-admin, /cart, /checkout, /account, /search, ?orderby=

This skips any URL whose path or query string contains those substrings. The audit will still discover them (so we don't miss orphan-link reports), but won't fetch or grade them.

Common exclusion sets by platform

WordPress

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/wp-admin, /wp-login, /xmlrpc.php, /wp-content/uploads/, /feed, /tag/, /author/

WooCommerce

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/cart, /checkout, /my-account, /add-to-cart=, ?add-to-wishlist=

Shopify

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/cart, /account, /checkouts, /search?q=, ?variant=, /collections/all

Generic SaaS app

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/admin, /dashboard, /api, /static, /assets, ?utm_, ?session=

Regex patterns

Wrap a pattern in forward slashes to treat it as regex. Useful when you need more precision than simple substring matching:

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/\/page\/[0-9]+\/?$/, /\?p=[0-9]+/, /\/(en|fr|es)\/admin\//

The first skips paginated pages like /blog/page/2/. The second skips WordPress preview URLs. The third skips localized admin paths.

Excluding by file extension

Static asset URLs (.css, .js, images) are skipped automatically. If your CMS exposes other extensions you don't want audited (.json, .xml), add them as plain string excludes: `.json, /sitemap-`.

Sitewide vs per-audit exclusions

Exclusions in Settings → Crawl apply to every audit on the workspace. To exclude paths for a single audit only, use Audits → New audit → Advanced → Exclude patterns. Anything set there is in addition to the sitewide list – there's no override.

Verifying your exclusions

After saving, run a small audit (depth 2-3). On the report, the "Crawl summary" panel shows how many URLs were excluded and the first ten patterns that matched. If something you wanted crawled was excluded, refine the pattern (e.g. swap a substring for a regex with anchoring).