My Crawl Is Stuck Or Paused
A crawl waits in a queue and has no fixed finishing time, so refresh the status first. Paused means either you paused the AI Chatbot or crawling was paused for the assistant, and each has its own fix.
Indexing runs in the background after you select Start indexing, Retry indexing or Recrawl on a source card. It never starts by itself, and Flidu does not promise how long it takes. This article covers a crawl that does not seem to move, a button you cannot press, and a status that reads Paused. Start in AI Chatbots: choose your assistant and open the Data Sources tab.
Read What The Source Card Says
The button at the bottom of each source card, and the line beside it, tell you where that source stands.
| Card Shows | What Is Happening | What To Do |
|---|---|---|
| Start indexing | The source is a draft. No crawl was ever started. | Select Start indexing. |
| Indexing queued, “Waiting for secure processing to start.” | The crawl is waiting for its turn. | Wait. There is nothing to press to speed it up. |
| Indexing pages, “Your pages are being indexed.” | The crawl is running. | Wait, then refresh. |
| Recrawl greyed out, with “Recrawl available” and a date and time | The source was crawled recently and its waiting period has not ended. | Recrawl after the time shown, which is in UTC. |
| Retry indexing greyed out, “You can try again shortly.” | The last attempt failed a moment ago. | Try again a little later. |
| Retry indexing greyed out, “This source has reached its retry limit for now.” | Repeated attempts failed. | Fix the cause, for example an address that is not public. Then remove the source and add it again. |
| Indexing unavailable, and the source reads Paused | Crawling is paused for this assistant. | See the section on Paused below. |
When A Crawl Seems Stuck
While a crawl is queued or running, the assistant’s Overview tab reads Preparing your content or Indexing your pages, with counts of pages found and pages indexed, and updates by itself. After a while the page stops updating and says “Still preparing — use Refresh to check for the latest.” That line is about the page, not about the crawl. Select Refresh to load the current state.
- Queued is a real wait. Website URL, Sitemap and Manual URL List sources are processed in turn after you ask. Files, pasted text and Q&A pairs are indexed directly when you select Start indexing.
- One crawl per source at a time. A second request for the same source is refused with “A crawl is already queued or running.”
- Your plan runs a set number of crawls at once. If starting another source shows a message that begins “Your plan runs”, wait for the current crawl to finish and try again.
- A source that is queued or being indexed is read-only. You cannot edit or remove it until the crawl ends. Existing answers stay available until the updated content is indexed.
- A refresh that fails keeps the old version. The card reads Previous version kept, and Ask AI goes on answering from the last successfully indexed version.
If a source has read Indexing queued or Indexing pages since the previous day, contact us with the assistant name and the source address.
When The Status Reads Paused
Paused can mean two different things. Look at where the word appears.
You Paused The AI Chatbot
If the status beside the assistant’s name reads Paused, Ask AI itself was paused, either with Pause Ask AI on the Preview tab or with Pause AI Chatbot in the Settings tab’s Danger Zone. Visitors get no Ask AI answers, and a crawl started while the assistant is paused does not complete: the source keeps its previous version, or reads Needs attention if it was never indexed. A recrawl started this way still counts toward the month’s recrawl allowance.
Resume first. On the Preview tab, select Resume Ask AI, or select Resume in the Danger Zone. Then start the crawl again.
Crawling Is Paused For The Assistant
If the source cards themselves read Paused and Add Source is greyed out, crawling for this assistant has been paused by the Flidu team. It is not something you switched on, and the dashboard has no control to resume it. A note on the tab says that source management is unavailable while crawling is paused, and you cannot add, edit, remove or index sources until it resumes.
Ask AI keeps answering from the pages that are already indexed. To find out why crawling was paused and to have it resumed, contact us.
What A Correct Result Looks Like
The source reads Indexed or Partly indexed, its card shows the Found, Indexed and Not added counts with a “Last indexed” date, and the button offers Recrawl. The status beside the assistant’s name reads Ready, or Active once Ask AI is published.
If the crawl finished but a page you expected is missing, go to My Pages Are Not Being Indexed. For how sources and recrawls work, see Add Website Data Sources.