Why do reviewed issues sometimes reappear?

When you review a potential accessibility, we make every effort to remember that decision across future scans of your site. However, due to the way websites are built and updated, it's not always possible to persist these decisions over time.

How review tracking works

Behind the scenes, Siteimprove uses a system to identify and match issues across different scans of your website. This is based on a combination of technical markers on the page, things like structure, location in the DOM, surrounding content, and other characteristics.

If a new scan finds an issue that matches a previously-reviewed one, your review decision will carry over.

Why reviewed issues might come back

If your website changes, even slightly, those technical markers may change too. These changes may be visually trivial to a human, but semantically significant to an automated system like Siteimprove. So, even if the issue is technically still the same one that was previously reviewed, it may fail to match the old hash and therefore appear as a new issue.

This can happen if:

• The structure of the page shifts (e.g., due to a layout change, CMS update, or content edit)
• HTML tags or classes are added, removed, or rearranged
• Dynamic content loads differently between scans

When that happens, Siteimprove may no longer be able to confidently match the issue in the new scan with the one you reviewed earlier. As a result, it can appear as a “new” potential issue, even though you’ve seen and reviewed it before.

What this means for you

• This behavior is expected and doesn't mean your review was lost or ignored.
• It reflects the nature of the web, pages are dynamic, and even small changes can disrupt automated issue tracking.
• You can always re-review the issue and mark it again if the situation hasn’t changed.