Your first run

Before you start

You need a site you control and its sitemap. A sitemap index (sitemapindex.xml) is fine — Vercatus walks the whole tree. If you only have the domain, Vercatus reads robots.txt and uses the sitemaps it lists.

In production, runs only start on domains you have verified.

Starting a run

1. Open the workspace and press New run (or ⌘K → New run).
2. Paste the sitemap URL.
3. Choose a page budget. The dialog shows what the run consumes — one full run of the site’s monthly allowance, how many requests it makes, and roughly how long the crawl takes — before you press start. A first run of 200 pages takes about ten minutes of crawling.
4. Leave Render in a browser and Analysis agents on. Turning agents off gives you the access matrix, technical findings and the retrieval simulation only, which is a quick way to sanity-check a site before the full analysis.
5. Press Start run. The run page shows each pipeline step as it completes.

While it runs

The pipeline has twelve steps. The first five — discover, sample, fetch, extract, deterministic — need no model and produce the machine-access matrix and the technical findings. The rest build the knowledge graph, simulate retrieval, and write the analysis.

A run that fails can be resumed from the step that failed; completed steps are not repeated, and a resumed run does not consume a second allowance.

When it finishes

• Overview (the workspace home) — what happened since last week, what needs a person, and each site’s direction: readable by AI assistants, questions answered, critical findings, over the last runs.
• Run overview — the pipeline, headline numbers, and what was discovered.
• Synthesis — how machines experience the site, the summary, and what to do in order.
• Findings — everything that survived review, most severe first. Open one to see its evidence and the hypotheses it rests on.
• Board brief — the same run for a non-technical reader: five figures, the position, the risks and the decisions. See The board brief.
• Open report — a standalone page you can send to anyone. See Reading a report.

Running from the terminal

vercatus run https://example.com/sitemap.xml -n 200 --wait
vercatus findings --severity critical
vercatus report <runId>

The CLI reference lists every command. A run started from the terminal counts against the same allowance as one started from the workspace.