About

A Boringhaus tool · ruleset 2026.09.0+1eb49e80

GSC Readiness is a free auditor. You paste a URL, we run it against the things Google Search Central documentation tells you to do, and you get a graded report.

What it checks

The audit runs 55 Google-documented rules across 10 categories, plus 20 unscored advisories. Every rule below cites the exact Google page it encodes and the date that page was last read against the rule's logic (latest: 2026-09-07).

• Indexing & crawl — Served over HTTPS, Page returns HTTP 200, Content-Type is an indexable HTML type, Redirect chain length, Redirect lands on a different host, robots.txt present, robots.txt allows Googlebot to crawl this URL, Sitemap declared in robots.txt, Google-Extended (AI training) robots handling, XML sitemap discovered, Sitemap provides <lastmod>, Sitemap URLs are fully qualified, No noindex directive, Canonical declared, Canonical is an absolute URL, Canonical points to this URL, Links are crawlable <a href>.
• Page metadata — <title> present, <title> length, Meta description present, Meta description length, Primary heading (<h1>), Section headings (<h2>), Favicon declared, Favicon fetchable by Googlebot-Image, Favicon is square and at least 48×48, Snippet / AI-feature controls, Character encoding declared.
• Images — Preferred image declared (og:image / primaryImageOfPage), Images have alt text, Hero images not lazy-loaded, Images use <img>, not CSS backgrounds.
• Structured data — JSON-LD structured data present, JSON-LD parses as valid JSON, Organization or WebSite entity declared, Organization has name, url, logo, WebSite has name and url, Article has headline, image, datePublished, author, Product has name and offers/review/rating, BreadcrumbList, ProfilePage has mainEntity with name, VideoObject has name, thumbnailUrl, uploadDate, Structured data matches visible content.
• International — hreflang annotations, hreflang x-default, hreflang set includes this page, hreflang URLs are fully qualified.
• Mobile — Viewport meta configured, apple-touch-icon, theme-color meta, Web app manifest.
• HTTPS & headers — No mixed content, HSTS (Strict-Transport-Security), X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, Clickjacking protection (X-Frame-Options / frame-ancestors), Content-Security-Policy, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy.
• Core Web Vitals — LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), INP (Interaction to Next Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), CrUX field data availability, PageSpeed Insights API, Time to first byte, Lighthouse Performance, Lighthouse Accessibility, Lighthouse Best Practices.
• Spam-policy hygiene — No meta-refresh redirect, No hidden text or links, No back-button hijacking.
• Open Graph & X cards — Open Graph core tags, og:image:width / og:image:height, og:image:alt, X (Twitter) Card core tags, twitter:image:alt.

How scoring works

Each check returns pass / warn / fail, or info for observations that carry no judgement. Only rules that are Google-documented and active count: pass = 1, warn = 0.5, fail = 0, averaged into a 0–100 score. Letter grade is A (≥90), B (≥80), C (≥70), D (≥60), F otherwise.

• Beyond Google — security headers, X cards, PWA extras, Lighthouse lab scores. Reported, never scored. A category with nothing scored shows no score instead of a misleading 0 or 100.
• Deprecated — features Google has retired (FAQ rich results, HowTo, the sitelinks search box, AMP). Their markup is harmless; we report it as info and never reward or penalise it.
• Info — things like "no CrUX field data" or "no hreflang on a single-language site" that are not defects.

How it stays current

Google changes its documentation most weeks. Every Monday a job re-fetches each Google page cited below, compares it with the copy it hashed the week before, and reads the Search Central changelog. Any rule whose source changed, moved or disappeared is marked under review here and on scan results, and a reviewer re-reads the page and proposes the rule change as a pull request. Nothing changes in the audit until a human merges it. The catalog and current flags are also available as JSON at /gscreadiness/api/rules.

Rule catalog

55 scored · 20 advisory · 5 deprecated · 3 retired

Indexing & crawl

Page metadata

Images

Structured data

International

Mobile

HTTPS & headers

Core Web Vitals

Spam-policy hygiene

Open Graph & X cards

What it doesn't check

We're an external auditor. We can't see:

• Whether your site is actually verified in Search Console.
• Your impression / click data from GSC's Performance report.
• Manual actions, security issues, or coverage details GSC surfaces internally.

For that you need the real Search Console at search.google.com/search-console. This tool is the "would your site pass if you submitted it today" predictive layer.

Independent and free

GSC Readiness is built by Boringhaus, an independent digital media company that runs a portfolio of useful, boring web tools. No login, no email capture, no upsell tier. The codebase fork from AEORadar's scanner added the GSC-specific checks; the audit logic and methodology page are open if you want to inspect what we score.

Contact

Questions, scan-result bug reports, partnerships: team@boringhaus.com.