monit reporting “connection failure” when actually a “content failure”?

Question

I have a monit rule which looks like this:

check host example.com with address example.com
  if failed url http://example.com/status
    content == "ok"
    then alert
  group example.com

But when the content doesn't match, instead of reporting a content error, Monit's HTTP status page reports a “connection failure” instead of the expected “content failure”, and the email simply says “failed protocol test”.

Have I misconfigured something? Or is monit normally this vague about failures?