What the hand-built sites actually do

Most of what gets written about spotting generated pages is a list of things to avoid. The more useful list runs the other way: the specific, checkable things that deliberate pages do and generated ones almost never bother with. On this site that's eleven detectors carrying negative weights, and running them across 28 real homepages produces a fairly clear ranking of what's common, what's rare, and what's essentially extinct.

The baseline almost everyone clears

Four things fire on 23 of the 28 sites. Authored Open Graph tags, meaning both an og:title and an og:image somebody chose, worth 9 points. Six or more hand-written ARIA attributes, worth 7. At least four semantic landmark elements instead of a pile of divs, worth 6. And a canonical URL, worth 4.

If you do nothing else from this post, do these. They're the cheapest four on the list, they're what every serious site already has, and three of the four also do real work for search and social independent of any of this.

The middle tier, where it starts thinning out

JSON-LD structured data fires on 17 sites, worth 6 points. A real CSS custom property system, meaning twelve or more custom properties, fires on 16, also worth 6. Then the drop gets steep. A skip-to-content link fires on only 11 of 28, and it's worth 9 points, tied for the most any craft signal subtracts.

That weighting is deliberate and the detector's own comment explains it in five words: generators do not do this. A skip link is invisible to anyone not navigating by keyboard. Nobody adds one to make a page look better, because it doesn't. It exists only if a person thought about somebody else's experience of the page, which is exactly the thing a scanner otherwise can't measure.

The rare ones

No utility-class soup, meaning not one Tailwind-style utility in the markup, fires on 10 sites and is worth 7. Honoured prefers-reduced-motion fires on 7, worth 8. Self-hosted typography instead of a font CDN fires on just 4 of 28, worth 7.

And then there's the hand-authored stylesheet detector, which looks for a plain unhashed style.css or main.css served directly rather than through a bundler. It's worth 8 points. It fires on zero of the 28 sites. Not one. That includes Craigslist, Hacker News, and motherfuckingwebsite.com, which is a site whose entire argument is that you don't need any of this.

The bundler won. It won so completely that a plain stylesheet is now rarer than a skip link.

Why craft does double duty

These signals don't only subtract. They also damp the aesthetic category, which is the largest and least reliable group of detectors on the site. The reasoning is that looks are the weakest possible evidence: anyone can reach for a gradient deliberately, and plenty of excellent designers do. So the more deliberate craft a page demonstrates, the less its rounded corners and glow effects are permitted to say about it.

This is the single most effective lever on a real score. Adding a skip link and a token layer moves the number further than deleting a gradient, because one of them subtracts once and the other subtracts and then reduces what an entire category is allowed to claim.

The honest limit

None of this makes a site good. A page can have perfect ARIA, self-hosted fonts, a full token layer, and still be useless to the person who landed on it. These signals measure deliberateness, not quality, and those are genuinely different claims. What they're good for is the narrow question this scanner asks: did somebody make decisions here, or did they accept whatever arrived.

The checklist, ordered by effort

• Set a canonical URL and author real og:title and og:image tags. Twenty minutes, and 13 points between them.
• Replace your outer divs with main, nav, header, footer, and article. Mostly find-and-replace, worth 6, and it fixes screen reader navigation as a side effect.
• Add a skip-to-content link. Worth 9, takes a few lines of CSS to hide it until focus, and it's the strongest per-minute item on this entire list.
• Move your hardcoded colours and spacing into CSS custom properties. Worth 6, and it's the change most likely to improve the actual codebase rather than just the score.
• Add a prefers-reduced-motion block around your animations. Worth 8, and it matters to real people with vestibular disorders.
• Self-host your fonts. Worth 7, meaningfully faster, and only 4 of 28 major sites bother, so it genuinely distinguishes a page.