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Criteria v2026-09-24

This is a snapshot of today. Checks marked Stable have held for years. Checks marked Changing are the part the field is still working out: when we learn something new, the rule changes and this history says so, with the date and the reason. That is why a label can change even if your site has not.

Since v2026-09-24 a version is named after its publication date (a second one on the same day would get the suffix .2). Earlier versions keep their names: until then the number was a sequence, not a month (v2026.11 does not mean November; all seven were published on 2026-09-23).

Criteria history

• v2026-09-24 · 2026-09-24 — The criteria now start from defects. Technical requirements (response, HTTPS, indexing, robots, encoding, viewport, canonical, language, sitemap, hreflang…) are met or not; if not, they raise a finding with a severity: critical, serious, moderate or minor. Only substance (words in sentences readable without JavaScript, excluding menu, footer, cookie banner and hidden text) is graded up to "excellent", by percentile of 56 home pages of Spanish small businesses (sample published with n, date, method and values, without names): "excellent" is only the top 8%, like Lighthouse's green, and also requires readable text, under 15% repeated blocks and no content finding. Site depth is "not rated" until there is an inner-page sample. Everything else is capped at "good": having no defects is expected, not a merit. Every open defect lowers its card's label (convention, by analogy with WCAG). What is required depends on the page type: a contact page is not measured in words. Up to 6 more pages of the site are checked, chosen deterministically, with at most 24 requests to the origin, one at a time, 1 s apart, stopping if the server asks; that part arrives later, with a progress indicator. Back doors are closed: a "HOME" title, no h1, a one-item BreadcrumbList counted as complete, skip links as anchors, a soft 404 that did not lower anything, an owner only linked. What this inspector cannot see (layout, contrast, a covering banner, console errors) is reviewed in a browser by the free mini-audit. Also: if the page does not return 2xx (a block on the inspector, a 404), what arrives is not analysed as if it were your page; when the page's lang contradicts the language of the text, the text wins and the wrong lang is a separate finding; text that React streams in hidden has its own finding; WordPress sample content counts as filler; a WordPress contact page and legal notice are no longer taken for articles. On names: until now the version number was a sequence, not a month (the previous seven were all published on 2026-09-23); from this one on, the name is the publication date. Results are not comparable with reports made under earlier versions. Many sites will drop without having changed: what changed is the criteria. Added the same day as an INTERFACE change, not a criteria change (no label moves): every card with data-value declares what that number is in data-value-kind (words, count, broken, bytes, http-status, per-1000-words), and those giving a part of a total also carry data-total. For outbound links and anchors, data-value counts the broken ones while the screen shows the total; now nobody has to guess.
• v2026.11.2 · 2026-09-23 — "Title, description and h1": the h1 may reflect the whole title or any of its segments (split by "|", "–" or "—"), not just the first. Under the previous rule, a brand-first title ("Brand — topic"), which Google accepts with a delimiter on either side, could never reflect the h1.
• v2026.11.1 · 2026-09-23 — The main entity (rated by "structured data", "properties per type" and "sameAs") becomes the one the graph itself declares as the WebSite's publisher; only if it declares none, the first root entity. It used to depend on the JSON-LD order, not on what the site says about itself.
• v2026.11 · 2026-09-23 — Rules rebuilt from verified evidence (64 sources confirmed by a second agent and reviewed by the GEO agent). Labels that move from v2026.10, and why: one h1 and a number of h2 are no longer required (HTML allows several h1); x-default is no longer required (Google recommends it, does not require it); og:url and title/description lengths no longer decide the level (Google does not ask for them; the description has no limit); redirects from the pasted URL no longer count (they depend on how it is pasted; Googlebot follows up to 10); having no sitemap becomes "not rated" (Google does not need one on small, well-linked sites); HSTS preload is not required (hstspreload.org does not recommend it); "no entity" becomes "not rated" on inner pages; robots.txt is evaluated on the page's path and for the 7 agents that decide appearing in search and answers, and training policy becomes informative; indexing is computed per engine (Google and Bing). Classes: language, viewport and images move to accessibility (not a cookbook class). New: HTML size, encoding, valid head, crawlable links, hidden text (informative), visible structured data, and owner and contact. Outbound links and llms.txt become informative.
• v2026.10 · 2026-09-23 — Closes the gaps that let incomplete pages score "excellent": indexing (noindex, nosnippet, X-Robots-Tag, which overrides everything), viewport, dates, article authorship, minimum properties per structured-data type, broken outbound links and figures with a source. The criteria now carry a review date: if nobody reviews them within 45 days, deployment fails.
• v2026.09.2 · 2026-09-23 — HSTS moves out of "response" into its own check, "transport". It is a security practice, not a legibility one: it could not lower the HTTP response label. Flagged by the GEO agent reviewing v2026.09.1.
• v2026.09.1 · 2026-09-23 — Bar raised: "excellent" now means nothing verifiable is left to improve in that area (HSTS, Open Graph, og:locale, hreflang return links, sitemap listing this page with lastmod, linked JSON-LD graph, heading hierarchy without skips, unique ids). New check: image alt text. Words without JavaScript and sameAs count were not tightened: no data backs a higher bar.
• v2026.09 · 2026-09-23 — First version: one label per check with its rule published, no overall score. Reviewed before release by the GEO agent against the cookbook.