October 2023 - including Search AI Blocked Pages Reports, Health Scores CSV Download, Precise Crawl Rates and Monitor alerts on segments

Legacy App Sunset

Release Date: October 31 2023

We migrated everyone over to our new React user interface last year, but continued to allow access to the legacy interface via legacy.lumar.io. We've now sunset the legacy apps.

Subcategory Health Scores in Monitor

Release Date: October 31 2023

We’ve now added subcategory health scores to Monitor dashboards, to help you build more targeted dashboards. Previously, the overall health score and main categories for both SEO and Accessibility, but now with the inclusion of subcategory dashboards you can get more granular in monitoring key issues for your domains. This allows you to spot issues more quickly, and drill down into the detail to understand what’s happened.

To access the subcategories in Monitor, create a new health score dashboard and then select the relevant subcategory from the column dropdowns. Don’t forget you can also insert columns up to a maximum of 15.

Screenshot of Lumar Monitor with the option to create a new health score dashboard highlighted.

Screenshot of Lumar Monitor with the ability to change a column highlighted, and showing subcategory health scores for Availability.

Duplicate Pages Fix

Release Date: October 30 2023

We’ve made some improvements to the duplicate body algorithm, to improve performance and accuracy for non-ACSII character sets. As a result of this improvement, the number of duplicate pages and duplicate body content may have decreased.

Meta Refresh Redirects in Body

Release Date: October 30 2023

Google detects meta refresh redirects in the HTML body as well as the head. Example previously did not detect meta refresh redirects in the body but these are now detected.

Looker Studio Additional Reports

Release Date: October 26 2023

Following the addition of a number of new reports to the Lumar platform in the last few months, we’ve updated our Looker Studio Connector to make them available to include in your Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboards and reports. This now means that all Lumar reports can be used in Looker Studio.

Looker Studio Accessibility Reports

Release Date: October 16 2023

The accessibility reports have now been made available for use in Looker Studio dashboards, grouped into the category of the issues (e.g. ARIA, Keyboard, etc.). This allows you to include data from the Lumar platform directly into your own Looker Studio dashboards, which helps communicate progress to stakeholders in a consistent manner. All data is pulled in live, meaning that your dashboards will automatically update as new crawls complete.

Find out more about Lumar’s Looker Studio connector.

Search AI Blocked Pages Reports

Release Date: October 12 2023

We have created 2 new reports called Google AI Blocked and Bing AI Blocked which will show you pages which have been blocked from indexing in the Search Engine AIs, and will not appear in Google Bard or Bing Chat.

The Google AI Blocked blocked report shows 200 response page which have been disallowed for the google-extended user agent token in the robots.txt.

The Bing AI Blocked report shows 200 response pages with a robots nocache or noarchive directive that will have limited visibility in BingChat.

The reports have a neutral sign as although they will reduce visibility in search, it’s assumed to be intentional.

You can find the new reports in Indexability > Non-Indexable.

Fix: Internationalized Domains Not Matching Crawl Sources

Release Date: October 10 2023

We’ve fixed a bug that meant internationalized domain names containing non-Latin characters were failing to match up data from crawl sources like Search Console, Log Files and Analytics.

Monitor Alerts on Segments

Release Date: October 9 2023

To help you focus in on important sections of your site, we’ve added the ability to use segments for alerts in Monitor. When setting up your alerts, you can now select from any of the segments that you’ve configured in Analyze, and you will only be alerted if the URLs within your chosen segment breach the set threshold.

Please note that there are a few reports that are based on data that can’t be used with segments. Also, it's not possible to create an alert on the same report twice for a single segment. You can, however, re-use a report if it’s on a different segment.

Accessibility Dashboard Templates in Monitor

Release Date: October 9 2023

To help you speed up creating accessibility dashboards in Monitor, we’ve added a new WCAG Level templates that you can use as a starting point.

In a Monitor board, when you click the + icon to add a new dashboard, select ‘New dashboard from template (see screenshots below), and you’ll see the following templates:

  • Level A - Giving an overview of Level A issues across multiple domains, projects or segments. Includes ARIA, Color, Forms, Keyboard, Language, Name Role Value, Parsing, Structure, Tables, Text Alternatives and Time & Media.
  • Level AA - Giving an overview of Level AA issues. Includes Color, Language, Forms, Structure and Sensory & Visual.
  • Level AAA - Giving an overview of Level AAA issues. Includes Color and Semantics.
  • Best Practices - This dashboard provides an overview of Best Practice issues. Includes ARIA, Keyboard, Name Role Value, Text Alternatives, Semantics, Sensory & Visual and Tables.

To access the templates, click on the + icon above your Monitor Dashboard and choose 'New dashboard from template'. You'll also be able to use the templates during the crawl setup process.

Screenshot of the Lumar Monitor dashboard showing the option to add a new board and create a new dashboard from template highlighted.

Screenshot of Lumar Monitor with the new accessibility dashboard templates highlighted. Templates exist for WCAG levels A, AA and AAA, as well as Best Practices. In this example, Level A and Level AA are selected and the reports that will be included in the dashboard are shown on the right.

Health Scores CSV Download

Release Date: October 4 2023

A project’s health scores trends can now be downloaded as a CSV.

The main health score trend chart shown on dashboards has a download button which will generate a CSV that includes health score trends for all report categories.

Screenshot of an Accessibility Overall Health Score in Lumar Analyze with the option to download the health scores in CSV highlighted in the top right corner.

Screenshot of the downloaded CSV file showing the health scores for accessibility across all crawls.

Precise Crawl Rates

Release Date: October 4 2023

The crawl rate setting precision was limited to whole numbers with a minimum rate of 1 URL per second. It can now be set in divisions of 0.1 URL per second, and be set as low as 0.3 URLs per second.

Screenshot of step 3 in the Lumar crawl setup process, with the crawl rate highlighted and showing the slowest possible crawl rate of 0.3 URLs per second.

Example Analytics Upload Not Automatically Recognized

Release Date: October 4 2023

The format of the example upload file we provide for the Analytics data source was not automatically recognized, and required users to manually map the columns to the Lumar fields. This has been corrected so that format will automatically be recognized.