Verification Governance

Website Inspection Methodology

What we look at when we inspect a website — and how each signal is interpreted.

HTTP response inspection

  • Status code, status text, and HTTP protocol version reported by the origin.
  • Response time, content type, content length, and content encoding.
  • Server, X-Powered-By, and CDN edge identifiers (when exposed).

Metadata analysis

  • Title, description, viewport, charset, theme-color, and language declarations.
  • Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata for social sharing fidelity.
  • JSON-LD structured data presence and basic shape validation.

robots.txt

  • Fetched from /robots.txt over HTTPS.
  • User-agent and Disallow / Allow / Crawl-delay rules are reported as-is.
  • Sitemap references are extracted for downstream discovery.

Sitemap discovery

Sitemap URLs are discovered from robots.txt, well-known paths (/sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml), and link relations. Discovered sitemaps are parsed for URL counts and last-modified hints only.

Headers and security posture

  • Standard response headers reported verbatim.
  • Security headers scored against the OWASP Secure Headers project.
  • Cookie attributes (Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite) surfaced for review.

Redirects and canonicals

  • Redirect chains followed and surfaced to a configurable depth.
  • Final URL, intermediate hops, and redirect status codes are reported.
  • Canonical link rel="canonical" values extracted and compared against the requested URL.

Last reviewed: June 2026.

Part of the Information Verification Trust Center. Published by Relationale LLC. Founder: Keiron Brown.