Method and downloads

D.1 What was tested

D.2 Definitions

• Indexable page: status 200 (page loads), no redirect, no noindex in the robots meta tag or header (a setting that asks search engines not to list the page), no query string (no ?-part in the address).
• Orphan: an indexable page that no crawled page answering 200 links to, in the server HTML or the rendered page.
• JS-only page: an indexable page whose links from other pages appear only in the rendered page, never in the server HTML.
• Rank: organic position (unpaid results, not ads), counted over organic results only. Google redirect links (google.com/goto) were resolved to their targets first. On desktop, all links resolved. On mobile, 7 "bitcoin etf" links did not resolve.
• Speed figures are lab data from one machine. Scores vary between runs, so the report gives ranges and medians.

D.3 Limits

• No Search Console, GA4 (Google Analytics 4) or GA360 (the paid Google Analytics tier) access. All traffic and keyword figures are modelled third-party data.
• No crawler user-agent tests (the identity string a crawler sends) were run, by agreement. The effect of the firewall on each AI crawler needs the firewall logs.
• events.grayscale.com blocked every test request with a bot challenge, including a real browser. Its content was not checked.
• Content behind logins (Institute classes, slate.grayscale.com) was not tested; only the status of their entry pages was recorded.
• A second crawler (a standard HTTP crawler with browser rendering on demand) fetched only 39 Institute pages (102 of its 150 requests were challenged) and no etfs page (429 at the first request), so page counts rest on the browser crawl and the sitemaps.
• The www host blocked the test browser for about 10 minutes after about 3,077 requests. The crawl had finished before the block. The www speed runs were repeated afterwards, and the www soft-404 test was repeated with fresh URLs.
• Content verdicts were written in batches against a fixed scoring guide and a quote check. Counts marked LIKELY rest on reading judgment, not on a script.
• The deck's Semrush, Ahrefs and AI-dashboard figures were not re-measured with those tools. This report's third-party figures come from a different provider, so they cannot show a change from the deck.

D.4 Google documentation rules used

• G-1 "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?"
• G-2 "Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?"
• G-3 "Does the main heading or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?"
• G-4 "Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?"
• G-5 "Is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content?"
• G-6 "We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it."
• G-7 "Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?"
• G-8 "Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?"
• G-10 "Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements."
• G-11 "It's important to have distinct text that describes the content of the page"
• G-13 "Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in search results."
• G-16 "Generally, Google can only crawl your link if it's an <a> HTML element" "with an href attribute."
• G-17 "Links are also crawlable when you use JavaScript to insert them into a page dynamically" "as long as it uses the HTML markup shown above."
• G-18 "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."
• G-19 "Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't.)"
• G-20 "This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward." (Core Web Vitals)

Sources (all under developers.google.com/search/docs): /fundamentals/creating-helpful-content, /appearance/title-link, /appearance/snippet, /crawling-indexing/links-crawlable, /appearance/ai-features, /appearance/core-web-vitals.