THE RUBRIC
Crawling, rendering & site structure
Whether the content is in the HTML, and whether the site hangs together.
Checks 16 12% of 129
Weight 10% of the overall score
Why it is weighted this way
Separated from indexability because a page can be perfectly indexable and still arrive empty. This is where client-side rendering does its damage.
What this category covers
- Whether content is present without JavaScript
- Internal link reachability and orphan detection
- Click depth from the homepage
- Sitemap accuracy against what exists
- Crawl traps from faceted or parameterised URLs
- Pagination and its canonical handling
Representative checks
A sample of what sits in this category, with how each one is decided and who is allowed to fix it. The full list of 129 lives in the product.
| Check | Method | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Content present without JavaScript The single most common finding on sites built with AI tooling. Most answer-engine crawlers do not execute your bundle. | Rule | Assist |
| Reachable from an internal link An orphan page depends entirely on the sitemap being read and trusted. | Graph | Assist |
| Click depth from the homepage Depth correlates with crawl frequency. Pages six clicks deep get visited rarely. | Graph | Assist |
| Sitemap exists, is valid, and matches reality A sitemap listing pages that 404 spends your crawl budget on nothing. | Rule | Auto |
| No crawl traps Faceted URLs generating infinite combinations consume budget that indexable pages needed. | Graph | Assist |
What usually goes wrong
- A page that paints entirely client-side, arriving at most answer-engine crawlers as an empty container
- Orphan pages that depend entirely on the sitemap being read and trusted
- Faceted navigation generating more URLs than the site has products
- Commercially important pages sitting five or six clicks from the homepage
When these checks return unmeasured
A check in this category that cannot run is reported as unmeasured and counted in the denominator. It is never rounded up to a pass, which is the difference between a score that bounds its own claim and one that implies it examined everything.
- The crawl is capped before reaching a section, which the coverage figure reports
- A rendering timeout prevents comparing the raw and rendered document
- The sitemap is unreachable, so its accuracy cannot be assessed
Where to start
- Compare raw HTML against the rendered page on five representative URLs.
- Find the orphans, then link to them from somewhere a reader would plausibly click.
- Cap or block the parameter combinations that generate URLs without limit.