Passthrough Mode
Temporarily skip all SEO rule modifications and serve your original pages unmodified — without disabling security features.
Passthrough Mode lets you temporarily disable all HTML modifications on a domain while keeping security features active. When enabled, the gateway serves your original unmodified pages — no SEO rules are evaluated, no HTML is changed — but Shield, rate limiting, security headers, and redirects continue to protect your site.
Passthrough is configured per-domain from the Passthrough tab in your domain dashboard.
When to Use Passthrough
Passthrough is designed for situations where you need to quickly stop all modifications without tearing down your proxy setup:
- Debugging — You suspect a rule is causing issues and want to confirm by serving unmodified pages
- Deployments — You're deploying origin changes and want to temporarily bypass rule evaluation
- Incident response — Something looks wrong and you want to immediately revert to serving original content
- Testing — You want to compare modified vs. unmodified pages side-by-side
What Gets Skipped
When passthrough is enabled, the following are skipped:
| Feature | Behavior |
|---|---|
| SEO rules | Not evaluated — no meta tags, canonicals, structured data, or HTML injections |
| Robots.txt modifications | Skipped — original robots.txt served as-is |
| Markdown serving | Skipped — original HTML served instead of markdown conversion |
What Stays Active
Security features continue to run because passthrough means "stop modifying my HTML", not "turn off the proxy":
| Feature | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Exploit Shield | Still blocks requests to exploit paths |
| IP Blackhole | Still auto-bans IPs that trigger exploit detection |
| Rate Limiting | Still enforces per-IP request limits |
| Security Headers | Still injected on every response |
| Redirects | Still evaluated and applied |
Passthrough disables all SEO modifications. If you only need to disable a specific rule, toggle that rule off individually from the Rules tab instead.
Enabling Passthrough
- Navigate to your domain in the dashboard
- Click the Passthrough tab in the sidebar
- Toggle Enable Passthrough Mode on
- Click Save Passthrough Settings
Changes take effect on the next request — no deployment or cache clear required.
Detecting Passthrough
When passthrough is active, the gateway adds a response header to help you verify:
X-SerpWise-Passthrough: manualYou can check for this header using curl:
curl -sI https://your-domain.com/ | grep X-SerpWise-PassthroughIf the header is present, passthrough is active and no modifications are being applied.
Automatic Passthrough (Circuit Breaker)
In addition to the manual toggle, the gateway has a built-in circuit breaker that automatically enters passthrough mode if the modification pipeline encounters repeated errors on a domain.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Error threshold | 5 errors |
| Error window | 60 seconds |
| Cooldown | 5 minutes |
If 5 modification errors occur within 60 seconds, the circuit breaker trips and the domain enters automatic passthrough. After a 5-minute cooldown, the gateway probes with a single request — if it succeeds, normal modification resumes; if it fails, passthrough continues for another cooldown period.
When the circuit breaker is active, the response header reads:
X-SerpWise-Passthrough: circuit-breakerThe circuit breaker is fully automatic and cannot be configured from the dashboard. It acts as a safety net — if your rules cause the modification pipeline to fail repeatedly, the gateway protects your site by serving unmodified pages until the issue resolves.
Passthrough Reasons
The X-SerpWise-Passthrough header indicates why passthrough is active:
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
manual | You enabled passthrough from the dashboard |
circuit-breaker | The automatic circuit breaker tripped due to repeated errors |
panic-recovery | The modification pipeline encountered an unexpected error on this specific request |
Limitations
- All-or-nothing — Passthrough disables all modifications on the domain. There is no per-rule or per-path passthrough. To disable specific rules, toggle them off individually.
- Circuit breaker is not configurable — The error threshold (5), window (60s), and cooldown (5m) are fixed. Per-domain configuration is planned for a future release.
- Circuit breaker state is in-memory — It resets on gateway restart and is not shared across gateway instances.
- No alerting — There is currently no notification when the circuit breaker trips. Check the
X-SerpWise-Passthroughheader or Prometheus metrics to detect automatic passthrough.