Sitebulb Release Rants

• The “Linking URLs” count in grouped link reports and exports now shows the number of pages containing each specific target URL and anchor text combination.

• Structured data properties that accept multiple value types now validate correctly, including integer values for merchantReturnDays.

• Start URL checks now explain connection failures and site blocking more clearly, and let you continue to audit settings when the URL itself is valid.

• Regex content extraction now returns multiple matches within each selected element and correctly supports the selected capture group.

• Accounts that are ineligible for a free trial now reach the trial-over screen instead of getting stuck on “Please wait, loading…”.

• Google Search Console connections now work with Search Console-only permissions, avoid authorisation errors in browsers already signed into Google, and display clearer messages when authorisation fails.

• Chrome Crawler audits on macOS now run without being interrupted by the “Chromium Safe Storage” keychain prompt.

• The “Has a link with an empty href attribute” Hint now correctly identifies empty and whitespace-only href values with both crawlers.

• Single Page Analysis now lists native lazy-loading images that Chrome has not downloaded, and image URLs containing words such as “white” are no longer incorrectly excluded as tracking pixels.

• Pausing and resuming audits no longer causes previously saved pages to be crawled again, preventing duplicate URL rows and inflated totals.

• Audits containing only URLs with search-style query parameters now open correctly instead of incorrectly reporting that no URLs were crawled.

• Audits on macOS no longer repeatedly crash and restart when a website closes an active connection during crawling.

Content extraction limits

“All matched items” now stores up to 25 values per rule, per page, across all extraction types, and each extracted value is limited to its first 2,048 characters; these limits apply to new audits.

Important note for MCP beta testers:
After upgrading, beta testers may need to reconnect their MCP servers in their chosen model provider.

Improvements

• Crawling is now faster and uses less memory, with per-page processing times reduced by approximately 25% to 48%.

• A new “Default HTML Template Analysis” setting lets you choose whether HTML Template Analysis is enabled automatically for new audits.

• Updated Windows installer is now available to improve compatibility with Windows 11 Smart App Control.

• Disabling the Google Search Console or Google Analytics integration now automatically clears it as a crawl source, preventing unavailable options from remaining selected.

Bug Fixes

• CSV, Excel and PDF report downloads now work correctly for archived Cloud audits.

• Starting a new audit no longer creates an unusable duplicate project after its settings are updated, and refreshing an audit in progress now reconnects to it correctly.

• Robots directives are now interpreted correctly, preventing max-image-preview:none from falsely marking pages as noindex and nofollow, while also correctly handling uppercase directives and pages with both general and bot-specific robots tags. Affected audits must be re-crawled because stored results are not recalculated.

• Content Search now excludes duplicate text embedded in scripts by Next.js, Nuxt and similar frameworks, so affected counts may be lower and more accurately reflect the visible page content.

Improvements

• URL List import now handles URLs that are missing a protocol, instead of producing broken, duplicated URLs.

• Reassigned Desktop licences can now be activated on a new machine without first deactivating them on the previous one.

• Sitebulb's Schema.org vocabulary now recognises newer shipping types and properties, including ShippingService and ShippingConditions. This prevents valid structured data using these properties from being incorrectly reported as "Not a recognised schema property/type."

Bug Fixes

• Deactivated licences will now remain deactivated until the user chooses to activate them again.

• Crawls no longer crash in a restart loop on pages containing many HTML template elements.

• Fixed an issue where pages containing certain <template> elements could cause the crawler to repeatedly restart and interrupt an audit. Audits containing these pages should now complete normally.

• We've fixed a bug where having multiple issues of the same severity in a category (e.g. two Critical issues in Indexability) inflated the score instead of penalising it. This also meant fixing one of those issues could paradoxically make your score go down.

  After this update, some category scores may be noticeably lower than before. If your scores have dropped but the reported hints haven't changed, your site has not got worse: the new number is correct, and the old one was inflated. Score trends from this audit onwards are directly comparable; comparisons against older audits of affected categories are not. 

• Duplicate page titles and duplicate H1 tags are now reliably detected across all crawled pages.

• The Organic Search Traffic chart for "Indexable Status of URLs with No Traffic" now displays correctly.

• The Historical Audit Data Google Sheets export now correctly reports "Needs Improvement" Core Web Vitals band values.

• Custom CSS selectors for Content Area, Footer, Aside, and Breadcrumbs in HTML Area Settings now correctly classify link locations.

• Chart y-axis labels no longer overlap the axis numbers on larger sites.