cnn.com

Ranked #213 of 300 on the Leaderboard. Analyzed .

Index Quotient

69.45

See it on the LeaderboardAnalyze again
96.17
Technical
46.01
Content
60.29
Answers
51.77
AI
93.01
Authority

Technical Health

96.17

Whether search engines can fetch, trust, and quickly load the site.

Strengths

  • CrawlabilityStrong

    Crawlers are welcome here: a sitemap points the way, links work, and pages are allowed into the index.

  • SpeedStrong

    Pages load quickly, and the server answers fast.

  • URL and canonical hygieneStrong

    URLs are clean and consistent, each page has one address, and missing pages say so.

Opportunities

Nothing stands out to work on here.

Content Quality

46.01

Whether pages say clearly what they are about, in a form machines can read.

Strengths

  • FreshnessStrong

    Something here was published or updated recently, and the site says when.

  • LanguageStrong

    The page language is declared and matches what is on the page.

Opportunities

  • Depth and readabilityMissing

    Pages carry almost no readable text, so there is nothing for search engines or answer engines to work with; writing real content is the whole job here.

  • HeadingsWeak

    Pages lack a main heading, or the headings they have are out of order; a page's structure should be readable from its headings alone.

  • Images and linksMissing

    Pages neither link to one another nor describe their images; linking every page from another, with link text that says where it goes, comes first.

Answer Readiness

60.29

Whether content is shaped and marked up so an engine can lift a direct answer.

Strengths

  • Structured dataStrong

    Pages carry structured data of the kinds engines use, filled in properly, and the site says its own name in it.

Opportunities

  • Question-and-answer shapeWeak

    Few pages are shaped as questions and answers, so there is little for an answer engine to lift as a direct answer.

  • Scannable formattingMissing

    Nothing here is formatted to be scanned: no lists, no tables, and openings that do not summarize; a summary up top and facts in lists is the place to start.

  • Navigation aidsWeak

    Few pages show their place in the site, so engines see pages rather than a structure.

AI Visibility

51.77

Whether AI systems can reach, read, and confidently identify the site.

Strengths

  • IdentityStrong

    It is clear who is behind this site, on its pages, in its markup, and in the public record.

  • Authorship and sourcingStrong

    Articles carry an author and a date, and the content points to its sources.

Opportunities

  • Readable without JavaScriptMissing

    Pages arrive empty until scripts run, so a crawler that does not run them sees nothing; putting the content in the page itself comes first.

  • AI accessWeak

    Most AI crawlers are turned away, or pages forbid being quoted, which keeps the site out of AI answers.

  • FeedsPartial

    Either a feed or sitemap dates are in place, not both; machines that watch for new content want both.

Authority

93.01

Whether the wider web vouches for the site.

Strengths

  • BacklinksStrong

    Plenty of other sites link here, including ones that matter.

  • TrafficStrong

    The site has a large audience.

  • Domain historyStrong

    The domain has a long history, and history counts.

Opportunities

Nothing here to work on. The points left are the ones only the web's largest sites earn.

Nearby on the Leaderboard

  1. #212asu.edu69.47
  2. #213cnn.com69.45
  3. #214cornell.edu69.44

Scores reflect what IndexBot could read from cnn.com's available pages on .

IndexBot

IndexBot is the crawler behind SEO Leaderboard. It visits a website only when someone submits that domain, reads it the way a search engine would, and leaves.

What it does

  • Fetches the homepage, robots.txt, the sitemap, and up to 24 more pages, at most four at a time.
  • Reads raw HTML only. It runs no JavaScript and loads no images, fonts, or scripts.
  • Visits a domain at most once every 24 hours, however many people submit it.
  • Stores what it measured, never full copies of pages.

How it identifies itself

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; IndexBot/1.0; +https://seoleaderboard.com/bot)

How to let it in

Bot protection often turns IndexBot away before it reads anything, and the domain then cannot be scored. If you run the site, allow the User-Agent IndexBot. In Cloudflare that is a WAF skip rule; most other tools have the same idea under a different name.

(http.user_agent contains "IndexBot")

IndexBot has no fixed IP range to allow instead, so the User-Agent is the only thing to match on. It never tries to disguise itself as a browser, and the limits above are the whole of what it asks for.

How to keep it out

IndexBot obeys robots.txt. Add this and it will not read your site, and your domain cannot be scored.

User-agent: IndexBot
Disallow: /

Questions

Write to bot@seoleaderboard.com.