Website metadata checker: what your page actually sends
Why the word count is at the top of the list
Metadata is easy to grade and rarely the problem. The problem we see over and over on the sites our reports read is subtler and far more expensive: the page is a shell. The head is complete, the title is well written, and the body that arrives over the wire contains forty words of boilerplate because everything else is rendered in the browser.
To a person it looks perfect. To anything reading the response — and that includes several of the crawlers that feed answer engines — there is nothing on the page to quote. This is the default state of a site built with an app framework and no server rendering, which increasingly means a site built by an AI app builder.
You can check it without any tool: curl -s https://example.com | wc -w. If that number is small, it is the first thing to fix and everything else can wait.
Metadata is necessary and not sufficient
Fix what is listed here — the Open Graph preview shows the other half of the head, the card a link turns into when it is shared — then find out whether it changed anything. Real buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Mode will tell you who is being recommended instead of your client, and which questions the site has no answer for at all.
Questions
- Why does it count the words in the HTML?
- Because it is the finding that outranks everything else on this page and almost no metadata checker reports it. If a page arrives with a full head and a handful of words in the body, the content is being painted by JavaScript after load. Some crawlers run JavaScript, several do not, and the ones that do give it much less time than a browser. A perfect title on an empty page is a perfect title on an empty page.
- How long should a title be?
- Around 60 characters is the usual rule of thumb, but the real limit is pixel width and it varies by device and by which characters you used. Treat the count as a nudge to put the important words first, not as a pass/fail line.
- Does a meta description affect ranking?
- Not directly. It affects whether the result gets clicked, and engines rewrite it when it is missing or unhelpful. Writing it yourself is about controlling the sentence, not about ranking.
- What does a canonical pointing somewhere else mean?
- You are telling engines that the other URL is the real version of this page and that this one should not be indexed separately. That is sometimes exactly right — syndicated content, a print version — and sometimes a template bug that has quietly de-indexed a section of the site.
- Is more than one H1 a problem?
- Not by itself; HTML5 sectioning made it legal and engines handle it. In practice several H1s usually means the page has no single subject, which is a content problem rather than a markup one.
- The tool says the site blocked it. What now?
- Some hosts refuse anything that is not a mainstream browser. That is worth knowing on its own: the same wall is in front of the crawlers that feed answer engines. Check the page in a browser and then check your robots.txt and your host's bot protection settings.
See who the engines recommend instead
The prompts your client loses, who wins them, and the tasks that would change it.