Running Your First Scan
Trigger a scan and understand what happens when Cassian analyses your store.
Running Your First Scan
A Cassian™ scan is a full analysis of your store. Cassian AI™ crawls your pages, evaluates content across five layers, and calculates your Cassian Score™. Your dashboard updates in real time as results come in.
How to trigger a scan
Go to your Dashboard
Click Dashboard in the left sidebar. If you've just added your store, you may already see a scan in progress.
Click "Scan now"
The scan button appears near the top of the dashboard, next to your Cassian Score ring. If a scan is already running, the button will show a progress state — there's no need to click again.
Watch the results appear
Your dashboard updates in real time. You'll see the Cassian Score ring animate to your score as the scan completes. Larger stores with thousands of pages may take a few minutes.
Your first scan is triggered automatically when you click "Start monitoring" on the Store Setup page. If you've just finished setup, your first results are likely already on their way.
What Cassian checks
Each scan analyses your store across five categories. All five contribute to your Cassian Score.
Technical Health — Page load performance, crawlability, broken links, missing or malformed structured data, HTTP errors, and SSL validity. Cassian Sentinel™ uptime data also feeds into this category if uptime monitoring is enabled.
Content Quality — The clarity, completeness, and quality of your store's written content. Cassian AI evaluates product descriptions, page copy, and meta content for thin content, missing information, and quality signals that affect both customer experience and search visibility.
Translation Quality — If your store sells in multiple languages, Cassian compares the quality and completeness of every translated page against your primary language. Missing translations, machine-translation artefacts, and accuracy issues are all surfaced here. (Monolingual stores skip this category, and the other four categories adjust their weighting accordingly.)
Platform Consistency — Requires a Shopify connection. Cassian compares your Shopify backend data (products, translations, pages) against what your storefront actually renders for visitors. Discrepancies — an active product that's not visible, a translation that isn't rendering, a collection with zero products — are flagged as issues.
LLM Readiness — How well your store content is structured and written for AI shopping assistants and AI-powered search. As more customers use AI tools to find and evaluate products, stores that communicate clearly and completely have a structural advantage. This category checks for the signals that matter to AI systems.
Filtering by category
On the scan detail page, a category switcher at the top lets you filter issues by any of the five categories. Click a category to see only that layer's findings, or click "All" to see everything. This is useful when you're working through fixes one layer at a time.
Dismissing issues
If an issue is intentional or not relevant to your store, you can dismiss it directly from the scan detail page. Click the dismiss button on any issue to remove it from the active count and exclude it from your score. Dismissed issues can be reviewed later from the Issues page.
Page limits by tier
Each scan crawls a set number of pages, determined by your plan. Deeper crawls find more issues.
| Tier | Pages per scan |
|---|---|
| Inspector | 10 pages |
| Analyst | 500 pages |
| Protector | 2,000 pages |
| Guardian | 5,000 pages |
| Prime & Enterprise | Unlimited |
If your store has more pages than your tier allows, Cassian prioritises your highest-traffic and most important pages first — homepage, collection pages, and your top product pages.
Scan numbers
Every scan is numbered sequentially: #1, #2, #3, and so on. These numbers are stable — they don't change, and they make it easy to refer back to a specific scan when comparing results over time.
You can see all your scan numbers in the Scans section of the sidebar. Each scan entry shows its number, date, score, and whether any issues were found.
Scheduled scans
Beyond manual scans, Cassian runs scans automatically on a schedule based on your plan:
| Tier | Automatic scan frequency |
|---|---|
| Inspector | Weekly |
| Analyst | Weekly |
| Protector | Daily |
| Guardian | Daily |
| Prime & Enterprise | Continuous |
You can always trigger a manual scan in addition to scheduled ones.
Degraded scans
Occasionally — rarely — Cassian AI may have reduced capacity during a scan. When this happens, some checks may not complete. You'll see an amber "degraded scan" banner on the results page.
A degraded scan shows a partial Cassian Score based only on the checks that completed. The score may be lower or higher than your actual score. A full scan will run automatically at the next scheduled time.
A degraded scan is not a sign that something is wrong with your store — it's a signal that Cassian's analysis was incomplete for that particular run. The results that are shown are accurate; they're just not the full picture.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a scan take?
Scan time depends on your store size and plan tier. The dashboard updates in real time so you can watch progress as it happens. Larger stores with thousands of pages may take a few minutes.
Can I trigger a scan manually at any time?
Yes. Click "Scan now" from your dashboard whenever you want a fresh scan. There's no limit on how often you can scan manually, though very rapid repeated scans (within seconds of each other) may be queued rather than run immediately.
How often does Cassian scan automatically?
Inspector and Analyst: once per week. Protector and Guardian: once per day. Prime and Enterprise: continuously. See the schedule table above.
What does "degraded scan" mean?
It means Cassian AI couldn't complete all of its checks during that scan run. The score shown is based on the checks that did complete. The next scheduled scan will be a full run. See the Degraded scans section above for more detail.
Why does my scan show fewer pages than I expected?
Your tier limits the number of pages crawled. If your store has more pages than your limit, Cassian focuses on your most important pages. Upgrade your plan to increase the crawl depth. See Billing for plan details.
Where can I see previous scans?
Click Scans in the left sidebar. You'll see a full history of every scan, numbered sequentially, with scores, dates, and issue counts. Click any scan to see its full results.
Can I compare two scans?
Yes. From the Scans page, click any scan to open it. The scan detail view shows your score for that scan alongside the previous scan's score, so you can see the delta at a glance. For a full trend view, the Dashboard shows a score trend chart across your most recent scans.
Next step
Now that you've run your first scan, understand your dashboard — a full tour of every section and what each number means.