Our SERP Analyzer has a feature called screenshots that give you an idea of how pages are rendered.
This is also the best way to show you how Google bots might see your page in mobile or desktop versions.
A complete screenshot tells you that Surfer is able to view, access, and retrieve data from your page.
However, there are some occasions where Surfer’s bots are not able to either fully or partially view your page. This is where the screenshots come in handy. In this case, the screenshots feature will help you see exactly what Surfer is able to see (or NOT see).
Having this knowledge could also explain incidences where it seems the Surfer Audit tool isn’t providing correct results like a zero word count or zero content score.
A few reasons why we can't crawl your page may include bad scripts on your page, a redirect, a pop-up, or your website has added security settings that block our bots.
For instance, in the screenshot below, Surfer’s bots can’t view the page, because they are blocked by the website’s security features. In other cases, the screenshot is completely blank.
By design, our crawlers try to mimic normal visitors, but this can trip certain firewall protections, depending on your exact server configuration.
If this is happening on your website, we can try to name a bot for you (using HTTP User-Agent header field). This way you'll be able to whitelist our bots in your firewall and allow us to crawl your website properly.
Just reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll do the rest!