The AO Audit · Published July 18, 2026
Our free scanner reads websites the way AI crawlers do. To do that from a browser, it depended on two free public relay services — infrastructure run by strangers, for free, forever. You can guess where this is going.
Both relays went down. Not flaky — down, at the same time, returning error 522. And here's the part that made it a lesson instead of just a bad night: we couldn't tell at first whether the outage was global or just our corner of the internet. So we proved it — we ran probes from a completely different network, on servers far from ours. Same 522s from there. Worldwide, simultaneous, both suppliers.
The wrong thing. Our error message said: "Couldn't fetch your site — it may be down, or it blocks automated readers." Healthy websites. Real business owners. Being told their site was the problem, because our supplier was down. That message had seemed reasonable when we wrote it. It took an outage to see it was an accusation.
Three things, that same night. First, the scanner now runs a control test when a fetch fails — it checks a site that is never down, and if that fails too, the message says the truth: "this is on our side, not yours." Second, any check we couldn't run is labeled NOT READABLE — not counted against your score, instead of quietly failing you for our problem. Third, we stopped renting our foundation: we built our own relay, which answered in 0.113 seconds from an outside network while both free services were still down. The free ones are backups now.
Every "free" tool you depend on is someone else's uptime, someone else's budget, someone else's Tuesday. That's fine — until your error messages start blaming your customers for it. The rule we adopted, now printed in every report we send: anything we couldn't read gets labeled as ours to explain — never counted against you, never silently skipped. An audit is only worth what its worst moment tells the truth about.
Want to see what our scanner says about your site? Free, about a minute, every check shown — including any we couldn't run.