Sampling and templates
Discovery
Section titled “Discovery”Vercatus resolves the entire sitemap tree and parses every child sitemap, recording an exact count and a kind (articles, tags, archives, products, news, locale …) for each. A 1.3-million-URL news site with 336 sitemaps is mapped in under a minute and costs nothing.
The URL universe kept for a run is capped (50,000 by default); the cap is allocated across sitemaps proportionally with a floor of one, most recently modified URLs first, so no sitemap is silently skipped.
URL patterns and templates
Section titled “URL patterns and templates”URLs are clustered into patterns — /blog/{slug}, /{locale}/products/{id} — by segment shape and
cardinality. After fetching, pages are clustered again by the structure of their HTML, which is what a
template actually is. A finding scoped to a template holds for every page that shares that structure,
including the ones not sampled.
The page budget
Section titled “The page budget”The sample is stratified by pattern and language so every stratum is represented, with the budget spread by the logarithm of stratum size so long-tail templates are not drowned by the largest one. Tag, archive and author pages are capped at 20% of the budget: they expose thin-template findings without crowding out the content.
A larger budget improves long-tail coverage of intents, claims and per-page findings; it does not much change template-level findings, which stabilise quickly. The run dialog prices any size before you commit.
Reading scope
Section titled “Reading scope”- site — holds for the whole site (or the sample as a whole).
- template — holds for every page sharing that structure.
- page — holds for that URL only.
Page-level findings are reported only when a pattern does not generalise; when a page-level issue affects most of a template or of the sample, it is reported once at the wider scope.