My Policy Health Score dropped between scans — troubleshooting

A score change between two scans of the same domain always has a specific, traceable cause — CrawlPact never adjusts a score without a detected change in what was actually declared.

Check what actually changed first

Every saved domain’s history timeline records each scan and highlights detected differences from the previous one. Before assuming something is wrong, check whether the change was intentional — a deployment, a CDN configuration change, or a plugin update can all alter robots.txt or other policy files without anyone directly editing them.

Common real causes

1. A robots.txt rule changed. A new Disallow line, a removed Allow line, or a rewritten wildcard group can all shift which crawlers are evaluated as allowed or blocked.
2. The registry changed, not your website. If a crawler’s purpose classification or lifecycle status was updated in CrawlPact’s registry (for example, a crawler moving from unverified to active, or being marked deprecated with a replacement), your score can change even though your robots.txt file is byte-for-byte identical. CrawlPact’s registry changelog records exactly this kind of change, separately from any change to a scanned website — see changelog.
3. A new finding was introduced. A change that creates a new conflict (for example, a broad wildcard rule newly overriding a specific one) lowers the score even if the specific line that changed looks minor.
4. The scan was incomplete. A scan that couldn’t fully reach your site (see Resource unavailable troubleshooting) is scored differently from a fully completed one, since an incomplete result reflects missing information, not a confirmed policy state.

Verify with evidence

Every finding CrawlPact reports includes the specific evidence behind it — the matched robots.txt line, the affected crawler, and the ruleset version used to evaluate it. Compare two scans’ full reports side by side rather than relying on the score number alone.