Two Thirds of Website Homepages Fail at Least One Basic SEO Check

Open Chrome, right-click any homepage, choose Inspect, and run the free Lighthouse test. In under a minute it gives the page an SEO score out of 100 and lists anything it failed: a missing description, an unlabeled image, a link that says "click here". Run that test on the homepages of the web, and two out of three come back with at least one failure.

For a business owner, that means the bar is low. These are not advanced ranking techniques. They are basic fields that tell Google what a page is about and how to present it in results, and most can be fixed through a website's content editor in an afternoon. Fixing them will not win rankings on its own, but it removes easy reasons for Google to show a weaker listing, and most competitors have not done it.

66.7% of website homepages fail at least one basic SEO check, and the failures are concentrated in two fields: the meta description, missing on 30.8% of homepages, and image alt text, missing on 26.2%. Scale is no protection: the 1,000 most visited sites fail 61% of the time.

We used the September 2026 HTTP Archive, a public dataset that tests millions of websites every month, and took every mobile homepage that had been through Google's Lighthouse test: 14,713,954 homepages. For each we recorded its Lighthouse SEO score and which individual checks it failed, and we grouped sites by popularity using Google's Chrome UX Report, from the 1,000 most visited sites to sites outside the top million.

Lighthouse is Google's free website testing tool, built into the Chrome browser. Its SEO score runs from 0 to 100, and a homepage scoring below 100 has failed at least one check. The checks include a meta description (the summary Google can show under a search result), alt text on images (a written description of each image), a title tag (the clickable headline in search results), descriptive link text rather than "click here", and links and pages that search engines are allowed to follow and index.

The failures are not spread evenly. Two checks drive most of them: the meta description, failed by 30.8% of homepages, and image alt text, failed by 26.2%. Both are content fields that a site owner can fill in through any website builder or content management system without touching code. Vague link text such as "click here" or "read more" comes third, on 12.5% of homepages.

The structural basics are mostly solved. Only 2.1% of homepages have links search engines cannot follow or block themselves from Google, and only 1.3% lack a title tag. The web has learned to get the plumbing right and keeps failing on the descriptive fields that shape how a page appears in results.

Most failures are small. The average homepage scores 91 out of 100, and 29.3% of homepages score below 90, so most failing homepages score between 90 and 99.

The most visited websites, with in-house SEO teams and large budgets, do only slightly better. 61% of the top 1,000 sites fail at least one basic SEO check, and 63% of the top 10,000. Sites outside the top million fail 66.5% of the time, almost exactly the web-wide rate.

A gap of under six points between the biggest sites and the smallest shows that budget and scale do not guarantee the basics get done. Large sites run on templates, and one missing field in a template repeats across every page built from it. The same is true of the small business site built from a theme that leaves the description blank.

Run Lighthouse on your homepage and your top landing pages. In Chrome, open the page, choose Inspect, then the Lighthouse tab, and run the SEO category. If you score below 100, the report names the exact check that failed. The likely culprits are a missing meta description or images with no alt text, and both are fixed in your website editor.

Then check your templates. If a product, service or blog template skips the meta description or image alt text, every page built on it fails the same way, and one template fix clears thousands of pages. Rerun the test after each change to confirm the score.

For larger sites, technical seo services find the template-level causes behind these failures and fix them across every page at once.

Embed this research

Cite this study