The behavior of the "Check HTTP status of external links" is too limiting/buggy. I believe that it should be renamed to "Check HTTP status out of scope".

For example, when the site audit is configured with a subfolder e.g. https://google.com/travel/ then links to points to the https://google.com/ domain but that are outside of https://google.com/travel/ are not crawled because they are considered outside of the scope, but shouldn't these links be crawled because "Check HTTP status of external links" is set to true?