# Blocked pages in your report

> How SEOFix detects firewall challenges, how blocked pages show up in a report, when it stops crawling a blocked section, and how to get full coverage.

Source: https://seofix.ai/help/blocked-pages · Category: Sites & firewalls · Updated: 2026-10-08

When a firewall or bot challenge answers instead of your page, SEOFix records the page as **Blocked by firewall**, not as broken, and leaves it out of the health score. To audit those pages, allowlist SEOFixBot with your site's crawler secret (see [Let SEOFix through your firewall](https://seofix.ai/help/firewall-allowlisting.md)) and run the audit again.

## How SEOFix detects a challenge

A page counts as blocked when it answers `403`, `429` or `503` and the response carries a known firewall signature:

| Provider | Signature |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | The `cf-mitigated` header, or `Server: cloudflare` plus a challenge or block page (including Cloudflare's 1015 rate-limit and 1020 blocked-by-rule pages) |
| Sucuri | The `x-sucuri-id` or `x-sucuri-block` header |
| DataDome | The `x-datadome` header |
| Akamai | `Server: AkamaiGHost` and an "Access Denied" page |

Anything else is treated as your server's real answer. A plain `403` from an unrecognised firewall, for example, is reported as an HTTP error on that page.

A blocked page is not retried and not parsed, so SEOFix runs no page checks on it. A challenge answered with `429` or `503` still makes SEOFixBot slow down for that host.

## What the report shows

- **Blocked** in the numbers strip at the top of the report, with "by a firewall" underneath.
- A **Blocked by firewall** issue (severity warning) per site section, where a section is the first path segment (`/jobs`, `/blog`, or `/` for the root). Its details give the number of blocked pages, the provider and up to 5 sample URLs.
- A banner **A firewall blocked N% of this audit** when blocked and skipped pages are more than 20% of the audit. It links to **How to allowlist SEOFix**.

Blocked pages do not count against your health score: the score is computed over the pages SEOFix could check.

When pages were blocked, the link graph is incomplete, so SEOFix skips the checks that depend on it: orphan pages, pages with only one incoming link, and redirects with no incoming links. Those checks would otherwise report false positives.

In the API, `GET /v1/crawls/{id}/report` returns:

```json
{
  "totals": {"pages": 1200, "blocked": 340},
  "blocked": {
    "count": 340,
    "skipped": 812,
    "providers": {"cloudflare": 340},
    "by_section": {"/jobs": {"blocked": 50, "skipped": 812}, "/blog": {"blocked": 290, "skipped": 0}},
    "sample_urls": ["https://example.com/blog/a", "…"]
  },
  "coverage_warning": {
    "code": "blocked_by_firewall",
    "blocked_ratio": 0.573,
    "message": "1152 of 2012 pages were blocked by a firewall challenge, so this audit does not cover them. Allowlist SEOFix and re-run."
  }
}
```

`coverage_warning` is `null` when 20% or less was blocked. `stats.blocked_pages` also holds the count. Each page row (`GET /v1/crawls/{id}/pages`) has `blocked_by`, the provider name or `null`.

## When SEOFix stops crawling a blocked section

SEOFix stops spending requests where every answer is a challenge:

- **Per section.** Once SEOFixBot has fetched 50 pages in a section and every one of them was blocked, it skips the rest of that section's URLs. They count as **skipped** (`blocked.skipped` and `blocked.by_section`), not as crawled pages.
- **Whole audit.** Once it has fetched 50 pages in total and every one was blocked, the audit stops.

A section with at least one page that got through keeps being crawled.

## Get full coverage

1. **Verify the site.** SEOFixBot sends the crawler secret header only for verified sites. See [Verify site ownership](https://seofix.ai/help/verifying-site-ownership.md).
2. **Allowlist the crawler secret** in your firewall:
   - Cloudflare: [Connect Cloudflare](https://seofix.ai/help/connect-cloudflare.md) creates the rule, or add it by hand.
   - Other firewalls: add a rule that skips challenges for requests with the `X-SEOFix-Verify` header set to your crawler secret. See [Let SEOFix through your firewall](https://seofix.ai/help/firewall-allowlisting.md).
3. **Test the rule** with **Check my setup** (site page → Cloudflare → Do it myself).
4. **Run the audit again** with **Run audit now**.

On Cloudflare's Free plan, Bot Fight Mode cannot be skipped by a rule. If pages are still blocked after the rule is in place, turn Bot Fight Mode off while the audit runs.

If you audit a site you don't control, you can't add the rule. Ask the site owner, or accept partial coverage.

## Related

- [Let SEOFix through your firewall](https://seofix.ai/help/firewall-allowlisting.md)
- [Connect Cloudflare](https://seofix.ai/help/connect-cloudflare.md)
- [SEOFixBot](https://seofix.ai/help/seofixbot.md)