THE RUBRIC
Technical foundation & indexability
Whether an engine can reach the page and is permitted to keep it.
Checks 20 16% of 129
Weight 15% of the overall score
Why it is weighted this way
Weighted heavily because everything else is conditional on it. A page that cannot be indexed cannot rank, cannot be cited, and cannot be improved by fixing anything else on this list.
What this category covers
- Status codes, redirects and redirect chains
- robots.txt directives, including the answer-engine agents
- Meta robots and X-Robots-Tag agreement
- Canonical tags, and whether they resolve
- HTTPS, certificate validity and mixed content
- Sitemap presence, validity and accuracy
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Page returns a 200 A soft 404 or a redirect chain ending nowhere is invisible to everything downstream. | Rule | Human |
| Not blocked by robots.txt Including the AI crawlers, which a robots.txt written years ago frequently blocks by accident. | Rule | Assist |
| No conflicting noindex A meta robots tag and an X-Robots-Tag header disagreeing is a common and silent cause of disappearance. | Rule | Auto |
| Canonical resolves to itself or a real page A canonical pointing at a 404 or a redirect tells the engine to index nothing. | Rule | Auto |
| HTTPS, valid certificate, no mixed content Mixed content downgrades trust signals and breaks rendering in ways that are hard to see. | Rule | Human |
What usually goes wrong
- A canonical pointing at a redirect or a 404, which tells the engine to index something other than the page
- A soft 404 returning 200, keeping a dead page in the index and spending crawl budget on it every visit
- A robots.txt written before the answer-engine crawlers existed, blocking them by omission
- A staging subdomain left indexable, competing with production for its own content
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 crawler is blocked outright by robots.txt or a firewall
- The page sits behind authentication
- The server times out or returns a 5xx during the crawl
Where to start
- Fix conflicting index directives first. They are cheap to correct and they remove pages silently.
- Resolve canonicals that point somewhere invalid.
- Audit robots.txt against the list of crawlers you actually want.