Sitebulb Release Rants

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.

• Improvements to PDF export layout and chart data tables. 

• Changing the default data directory in Settings now correctly applies to new projects. 

• The "Hints by importance" and "Hints by type" charts in the Data Studio connector now show data correctly. 

• RSS feed URLs are now correctly classified as XML, so HTML-specific hints like "Title tag is missing" no longer fire against them. 

• All references to "Looker Studio" have been updated to "Data Studio" across the app and connector.