MySQL schema design for audits, tracked keywords, and domain history

It is not enough to store one audit result. A usable product also needs repeated domain runs, per-path updates, shareable report records, keyword snapshots, API usage events, and plan-aware user state. The schema therefore needs to balance normalization with fast operational queries.

The more historical views the client panel offers, the more important it becomes that the tables still tell a readable story under direct inspection.

A clean model usually separates a domain scan run from the pages scanned during that run. That lets the UI show both overall progress and per-path results without inventing awkward derived state later.

Production issues often surface around uniqueness assumptions, too-long identifiers, or fields that were fine in code but awkward in MySQL. Practical schema design means checking how constraints behave in the actual database engine, not only in the ORM model.

When support or operations engineers need to inspect a customer problem quickly, table names, foreign keys, and state columns should be obvious. Schema clarity reduces recovery time in a way users will feel even if they never see the tables directly.