theguardian.com

Ranked #66 of 300 on the Leaderboard. Analyzed .

Index Quotient

78.24

See it on the LeaderboardAnalyze again
98.00
Technical
83.93
Content
47.94
Answers
68.15
AI
93.17
Authority

Technical Health

98.00

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

83.93

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

Strengths

  • Depth and readabilityStrong

    Pages say enough to be useful, in plain language, and stay on the topic their titles promise.

  • Images and linksStrong

    Images are described in text, and pages link to each other with links that say where they go.

  • HeadingsStrong

    Each page has one main heading, with subheadings in a sensible order beneath it.

Opportunities

  • Titles and descriptionsPartial

    Titles are mostly in place; descriptions and link previews are patchier, and each page wants ones of its own.

Answer Readiness

47.94

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

Strengths

  • Scannable formattingStrong

    Pages open with a short summary and use lists and tables, so an engine can lift the facts without reading everything.

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.

  • Navigation aidsMissing

    Pages give no sign of where they sit in the site; a breadcrumb trail on interior pages, in text and in markup, is the fix.

  • Structured dataPartial

    Structured data is partly there: not on every page, not always complete, and not always the types that earn rich results.

AI Visibility

68.15

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

Strengths

  • Readable without JavaScriptStrong

    The content is in the page itself, marked out from the navigation, and written in prose a machine can lift.

  • FeedsStrong

    The site offers a feed, and its sitemap says when pages last changed.

Opportunities

  • IdentityPartial

    Who is behind the site is partly clear; an About page, a Contact page, and markup naming the organization would let machines say so with confidence.

  • AI accessPartial

    AI systems are partly allowed in: some crawlers are blocked, or pages limit how much of them may be quoted.

  • Authorship and sourcingPartial

    Some articles say who wrote them and when, and some pages cite sources; the rest should say so too.

Authority

93.17

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. #65pcmag.com78.71
  2. #66theguardian.com78.24
  3. #67warwick.ac.uk78.21

Scores reflect what IndexBot could read from theguardian.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.