Crystal Ball checks covered

SCAN_PREP, blocked staging, public URL checks

What the flag means

This guide is for confusing scans rather than one specific failure. If Crystal Ball reports blocked, missing, or unverified signals, the site may not have been ready for a clean scan.

This is a problem because staging protections, passwords, noindex settings, firewalls, unpublished pages, and messy redirects can make a healthy page look broken or make a broken page look mysterious.

Common causes

Common causes include scanning editor URLs, preview links, staging domains, password-protected pages, URLs blocked by robots.txt, CDN security challenges, unpublished content, or pages that were changed but not republished.

How to fix it

  • Custom HTML/static: Scan the final public canonical URL, not a staging page. Confirm the page returns 200, is not noindexed, and has title, headings, links, and core content in the HTML.
  • WordPress: Disable staging noindex settings before launch, clear caches, update permalinks, and confirm the SEO plugin is not hiding the page.
  • Shopify: Make sure products, collections, and pages are published to the Online Store and not hidden by apps, passwords, or theme conditions.
  • Wix: Publish the site, check page SEO settings, confirm the page is not hidden from search, and test the live URL rather than the editor URL.
  • Webflow: Publish to the correct domain, check noindex settings, confirm the custom domain is live, and scan the canonical published URL.

Need help?

If the fix gets murky, visit Support and send the details. Bug reports and Crystal Ball questions are free support. Implementation and development work may be paid support, but we will tell you clearly before anything becomes paid. No surprise invoices from the tower.