A page you care about may be hard to reach from the rest of your site. The graph helps you see which internal links appeared in the scan and check whether the paths you expected are represented.
The Site Structure Graph is a snapshot of what TrustyRunner observed during a scan. It helps you understand which internal relationships were represented within the acquired scope.
It does not describe the complete or ideal site structure, how people actually navigate, or how important pages are.
How to read the graph
Each node represents a URL in one of three situations:
- Acquired content: a page or piece of content that the scan acquired.
- Observed internal target: a URL that TrustyRunner found an internal link to, but whose HTML content the scan did not acquire. It may have been requested and redirected, or may not have provided HTML content.
- Sitemap-only URL: a URL found in acquired sitemap data. No links are created when the scan did not observe them.
A line in the graph (an edge) means only that TrustyRunner observed an internal <a href> to that URL in an acquired page. It does not prove that anyone followed the link, that the target returns HTTP 200, or that the relationship is good, bad, or especially important.
If /old redirects to /new and the acquired content is /new, links found in that content structurally belong to /new. The edge target remains the URL found in the href, even when that URL redirects.
No internal inbound links observed
When the graph shows no observed internal inbound links for an acquired page, TrustyRunner did not find another page pointing to that URL within the acquired scope.
This is an observed fact, not an automatic error. The page may be intentionally isolated, a landing page, a technical page, reachable through paths that were not acquired, or missing a link you intended to provide.
If the graph says that observed edges were omitted because of coverage limits, it may say “no inbound links represented.” In that case, you cannot conclude that no acquired page linked to the URL.
To assess it, ask:
- Should the page be part of normal navigation?
- Does it make sense for it to be reached only through campaigns or external links?
- Are there pages on the site where a link to it would make sense?
- Is it intentionally separate from the rest of the structure?
If the isolation is not intentional, consider adding a relevant internal link from a genuinely related page.
Internal target not acquired as content
This node means an acquired page contains an internal link to that URL, but the graph does not retain acquired HTML content for it. That alone cannot tell you whether the URL is available, which HTTP response it returns, or why it is not shown as acquired content.
Review the path only if you expected to find a page in the graph. Inspecting the link, destination, and scan coverage can help.
URL observed only in the sitemap
This node appears because TrustyRunner found the URL in acquired sitemap data without observing an internal relationship to represent in the graph. It does not prove that the URL is disconnected from the site: the relationship may be outside the acquired scope or may not have been retained.
It can be useful to compare the URL with the structure you expect, especially if you expected it to be discovered through internal links.
Graph limits and a new scan
The graph represents what TrustyRunner observed within the scan scope. Some pages or relationships may not appear because the crawl was incomplete, a node limit or edge limit was reached, observed internal targets were omitted, or sitemap-only URLs were omitted. Incomplete or unavailable sitemap data can also reduce coverage.
A visual view can help you spot pages that appear separate, highly interconnected areas, structurally deep paths, URLs known from a sitemap without represented relationships, and observed internal targets that were not acquired as content. These are points to review in the context of your site.
A useful cycle is: observe, assess, change when appropriate, run a new scan, and check how the graph changes. For example, after adding a relevant link, the relationship may appear if both pages are within the acquired scope and the graph's limits allow it to be represented. Coverage and limits can change between scans.