Lighthouse Auditing for Publishers

In February, we announced the launch of SEO auditing tools in Lighthouse Chrome Extension, which is now available in Google Chrome Developer tools.

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.  Lighthouse is designed to help publishers improve the quality of their web sites, by providing tools and features for their developers to run audits for performance, compatibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.

The SEO audit category within Lighthouse was designed to validate and reflect the SEO basics that every site should get right, and provides detailed guidance to fix those issues. Current audits include checks for valid rel=canonical tag, successful HTTP response code, page title and description and more.

How do I use Lighthouse?

You can run Lighthouse in several ways:

Using the Lighthouse Chrome Extension:

1. Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension
2. Click on the Lighthouse icon in the extension bar
3. Select the Options menu, click “SEO” and click OK, then generate report

Using Chrome Developer tools on Google Chrome:

1. Open Chrome Developer Tools
2. Go to Audits
3. Click Perform and audit
4. Click the “SEO” checkbox and click Run Audit.

The SEO audits category is not designed to replace any of your current strategies, or tools, nor does it make any SEO guarantees for Google websearch or other search engines.  However, it covers some of the SEO best practices that are relevant for Webmasters and publishers who want to ensure their website is visible in Search. These checks are part of best practices that we provide for our publisher partners.

Posted by:

John Brown

Head of Publisher Policy Communications