Medium impact · weight 5 · worth up to 0.9 points of the total score
A canonical aimed somewhere else tells Google to index that other URL instead of this one. Done by accident, usually by copying a template, it removes the page from search while everything still looks fine on screen.
Point the canonical at this page's own absolute URL, unless it is genuinely a duplicate of another page.
Check a page for this, and the other 75 checks at once
Document declares its language
The lang attribute tells screen readers which pronunciation rules to use and helps search engines serve the page to the right audience. Without it a screen reader may read English text with the wrong phonetics.
Meta description length is in range
Descriptions shorter than about 120 characters leave the snippet half empty; past about 160 the end is cut off mid-sentence.
AI crawlers may read the page
ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI features quote pages their crawlers are allowed to read. A robots.txt rule that blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended keeps the page out of those answers. Blocking the training crawlers can be a deliberate choice; blocking all of them is rarely intended.
AI crawlers are not refused at the edge
robots.txt can welcome AI crawlers while the CDN or firewall in front of the site turns them away. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new sites since July 2025, and many security plugins do the same. We request the page as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot and look for refusals and challenge pages. Our requests do not come from those companies' addresses, so a rule that checks the address as well may treat the real crawlers differently.
