Scope rules

What we test controls which URLs belong in a or . Those rules are the main customer-facing way to shape the crawl before and during discovery.

Allowed, denied, and forced

Allowed rules describe URL patterns Silktide may include. If you set any allowed rules, only matching URLs (plus forced pages) are in scope.
Denied rules remove matching URLs from that allowed scope. Denied always wins over allowed.
Forced pages tell Silktide to include specific important URLs even when they are not discovered through normal links. They still need to be reachable when the test runs.

Rules support several match types, including URL beginnings and endings, text matches, regular expressions, and URL-length conditions. Keep rules as narrow as you can while still representing the site accurately. After changing them, run a new test and review Inventory coverage.

Why the whole website is URL-only

The website as a whole (the root "all pages" view) can only use URL rules. Silktide has to decide whether a URL is worth fetching before it downloads the page. At that moment, the only reliable information is the URL itself.

are different. A section is a defined part of the website that reports as if it were a site of its own. Once a page has already been downloaded for the website, Silktide can also apply content-based rules on a section - rules that look at what is on the page, not only at the URL. Those rules can place a page in a section, or keep it out, based on things such as text or other page content.

That is why advanced, content-based rules are available for sections but not for the website as a whole: the website-level decision has to stay decidable from the URL alone, or discovery would have to download every candidate page first.

Why downloading first would not work for the whole site

If website scope depended on page content, Silktide would need to fetch a page before knowing whether it was allowed. On a large site that would mean downloading far more than you intend to test, then throwing most of it away - slower, more expensive, and more likely to trip rate limits. URL rules keep the outer boundary cheap to evaluate. Sections refine membership afterward, when the page content is already available.

How this fits with the rest of scope

URL and section rules are only part of testing scope. Authentication, crawlability, redirects, robots.txt (not enforced by default), advanced crawler settings, and also affect what is found.

Configure the day-to-day rules on What we test. Use this article when you need the model behind those controls.