Discoverability · Recommended · Medium impact
Canonical and hreflang discipline
An agent needs one consistent URL per important page.
- Recommended
- Medium impact
- Adopted standard
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Check id | canonical |
| Dimension | Discoverability (20%) |
| Tier | Recommended — pool 20 pts |
| Weight inside tier | 2 |
| Impact | Medium |
| Maturity | Adopted — A ratified standard with real deployment. |
| Conditional | No |
| Publishing skill | canonical |
| Standards | — |
What is measured
The scanner extracts the link rel=canonical element and every link rel=alternate hreflang element from https://<domain>/ ($home in the probe map). Pass = exactly one absolute, self-referential canonical on https with no tracking parameters, plus, when translations exist, reciprocal hreflang alternates that include an x-default. Partial = a canonical that is relative to another host or points at a different URL, or hreflang values that no other language version links back to. Fail = no canonical element on the page.
Reproduce it yourself
You do not have to take our word for any of this. Run the same measurement against your own domain:
DOMAIN=example.com
curl -sS "https://$DOMAIN/" | grep -Eio '<link[^>]+rel="(canonical|alternate)"[^>]*>'
The fix
This is the artifact to ship. It is the complete change, not a description of one.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pricing">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/pricing">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/preise">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/pricing">
Related checks
| Check | Tier | Impact | Same skill |
|---|---|---|---|
reachable — Homepage open to agent access | Essential | Critical | — |
robots-txt — robots.txt with agent directives | Essential | High | — |
sitemap-xml — sitemap.xml valid and current | Essential | High | — |
llms-txt — /llms.txt published and well-structured | Essential | Critical | — |
link-headers — Discovery via Link response headers | Emerging | Medium | — |
dns-aid — DNS-AID discovery record | Emerging | Medium | — |
llms-full — /llms-full.txt expanded context | Recommended | Low | — |
agents-md — AGENTS.md with the required sections | Recommended | High | — |