An audit failed. What should I do
Click Re-Audit once. 7 in 10 failed audits succeed on the second try because the cause is a transient network blip. If it fails again, the URL is almost cer…
Click Re-Audit once. 7 in 10 failed audits succeed on the second try because the cause is a transient network blip. If it fails again, the URL is almost certainly behind a bot block, a login wall, or is offline.
What "failed" actually means
A failed audit is any run where the run-audit edge function could not produce a health score. The function returns 1 of 4 reasons: HTTP fetch timeout (10 seconds), PageSpeed timeout (25 seconds), DNS resolution error, or HTTP status >= 400 from the target. The error appears as a red banner on the lead detail page with the specific reason.
Think of it like a pizza driver who could not deliver. The address was wrong, the road was closed, or no one answered.
How to diagnose in 30 seconds
Walk these 4 checks in order:
- Open the URL in your browser. If it does not load for you, it will not load for LemAudit.
- Check for a Cloudflare or hCaptcha challenge. If a "verify you are human" page appears, LemAudit sees that page, not the real site, and abandons.
- Confirm HTTPS. `http://` URLs that 301 to `https://` work; pure-HTTP sites with no redirect fail.
- Check your [audit quota](/help/billing/what-are-audit-limits-per-plan). If you are at the cap, every new audit fails immediately with a quota message.
If all 4 pass and the audit still fails, the widget troubleshooter covers the related case where audits run from the embedded widget specifically.
Worked example
An agency saw 4 failed audits in a row on a regional law firm's site. Browser load worked. Reason: Cloudflare bot fight mode was on. The agency emailed the firm asking them to whitelist crawler.lemaudit.com for 5 minutes; the next audit completed in 14 seconds and scored 62. They closed the deal a week later.
When this isn't right
Some sites are genuinely unauditable: behind SSO, IP-allowlisted, or Cloudflare zero-trust gated. For those, screenshot the prospect's homepage manually and write outreach without an audit. Tools like Lighthouse CLI run from your own machine bypass remote bot blocks; that is a fair fallback when LemAudit cannot reach the site at all.