Audit Statuses
Reference for all audit status values in SitePulse — what each status means, how long it lasts, and what triggers transitions.
Every audit in SitePulse moves through a lifecycle of status values. This page documents each status, its meaning, and what triggers the transition to the next state.
Status lifecycle
pending → queued → running → completed
→ failed
→ timeout
An audit can also be in canceled state if it was manually canceled before completion.
Status reference
pending
The audit has been created but not yet picked up by the worker queue.
Duration: Usually milliseconds; up to 5 seconds under high load.
What to do: Nothing — this is the initial state immediately after submission.
queued
The audit task has been placed in the Celery queue and is waiting for a worker to pick it up.
Duration: Usually seconds; up to 60 seconds under high load.
What to do: Nothing — the audit will proceed automatically when a worker is available.
running
A worker has picked up the audit and is actively processing it. For URL audits this means: Lighthouse is running, MCP tools are fetching data, and the AI analysis is in progress.
Duration:
- URL audit: 30–90 seconds
- Sitemap audit: 1–5 minutes (depends on URL count)
- GitHub audit: 1–3 minutes
- Competitor audit: 1–2 minutes
What to do: Nothing — monitor the progress bar on the audit page. The browser polls for status updates automatically.
completed
The audit finished successfully. All scored categories have results.
What to do: Review the results, apply recommended rewrites or CMS patches.
failed
The audit encountered an unrecoverable error. Common causes:
| Cause | Details |
|---|---|
| Target URL unreachable | The URL returned a non-200 status or timed out |
| Lighthouse timeout | Page took too long to render (>60s) |
| AI analysis error | The AI provider returned an error or was rate-limited |
| Parse error | The audit result could not be parsed into structured data |
What to do: Check the error message shown on the audit page. See Troubleshooting for diagnosis steps. You can re-run the audit from the Re-audit button.
timeout
The audit exceeded the maximum allowed duration (5 minutes for URL audits, 15 minutes for sitemap audits).
What to do: The audit worker will not retry automatically on timeout. Re-run the audit. If timeouts persist for a URL, the target page may be too slow or require authentication.
canceled
The audit was manually canceled before completion. Canceled audits do not count against your quota.
What to do: Nothing required. You can start a new audit for the same target.
Sitemap audit child statuses
Sitemap audits have two levels of status: the parent sitemap audit and each child URL audit.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
pending | URL is queued but not yet started |
running | URL audit is in progress |
completed | URL audit succeeded |
failed | URL audit failed (the parent sitemap audit continues) |
skipped | URL was excluded (non-HTML, too large, or blocked by robots.txt) |
The parent sitemap audit moves to completed when all child URLs have finished (regardless of whether some children failed). The overview shows a breakdown of completed vs. failed child counts.
Subscription states
Subscription states are separate from audit statuses. See Stripe Checkout & Portal for the active, past_due, canceled, and incomplete subscription states.
Status polling
The audit detail page polls for status updates every 3 seconds while an audit is in pending, queued, or running state. Polling stops automatically when the audit reaches a terminal state (completed, failed, timeout, canceled).