Worked examples gov.uk
Is gov.uk vibe coded?
The accessibility benchmark most commercial sites quietly fail. We fetched the homepage on 29 August 2026 and ran all 86 detectors over the raw HTML — the same scan you get from the box on the front page, frozen here so the numbers can be argued with.
www.gov.uk
Hand-written
Somebody sat down and made decisions. Several of them were opinions.
- Vibe tells
- 0
- Craft tells
- 5
- Confidence
- medium
Enough signal to have an opinion.
Where the score came from
- Platform fingerprintsnone
Artefacts of the tool, not of taste
- Colour, type and surfacenone
The visual defaults, applied unedited
- Layout and architecturenone
The shape a page takes when nobody asks what it needs to say
- Copy tellsnone
How the words were written
- Leftoversnone
Scaffolding never cleaned up
- Source and buildnone
What is visible in the shipped code
- How it behavesnone
Weight, mobile, accessibility, SEO — where the money leaks
- Human craft5 hits
Evidence of deliberate decisions
Evidence
5 findings- −9
Deliberate social preview
Open Graph title and image were both authored.
- −9
Skip-to-content link
A keyboard skip link exists. Generators do not do this.
- −7
Hand-written ARIA
14 explicit accessibility attributes.
- −6
Semantic landmarks
5 landmark elements instead of a pile of divs.
- <main
- <nav
- <footer
- <header
- <section
- −4
Canonical URL
Canonical link is set.
What we read
- title
- Welcome to GOV.UK
- generator
- —
- server
- nginx
- status
- 200
- html
- 83.5 KB
- words
- 805
- fetched in
- 533 ms
Reading this score
gov.uk landed on 5/100, which puts it in the hand-written band. That number is not a percentage and not a probability — it is strength of evidence: 0 points of tells, damped by craft, less 35 points of deliberate decisions, mapped through one logistic curve.
Nothing pushed it up. Not one stack fingerprint, aesthetic default, copy tell or leftover fired on this page — which is rarer than it sounds.
What pulled it down
- Deliberate social preview −9 — Open Graph title and image were both authored.
- Skip-to-content link −9 — A keyboard skip link exists. Generators do not do this.
- Hand-written ARIA −7 — 14 explicit accessibility attributes.
- Semantic landmarks −6 — 5 landmark elements instead of a pile of divs.
- Canonical URL −4 — Canonical link is set.
Craft we looked for and did not find
These are the actionable half of the report. None of them are hard, and every one of them would have moved the number.
- Structured data
- prefers-reduced-motion honoured
- Self-hosted typography
- CSS custom property system
- Hand-authored stylesheet
- No utility-class soup
What this scan cannot see
One request, no JavaScript executed. So everything below is invisible to us, and a page can be excellent or awful at all of it without moving the score:
- Domain registration age — needs WHOIS.
- Whether the nav's /about and /pricing actually resolve — needs a crawl, not one fetch.
- package.json dependency count, orphaned code, clashing abstractions, test coverage — needs the repo.
- Backend security shortcuts: string-built SQL, verify=False, missing auth on endpoints — needs the source.
- Whether row-level security or Firebase rules are actually switched on — needs the project.
- Console errors, hydration warnings and runtime 404s — needs a browser executing the page.
- Real Lighthouse numbers and horizontal scroll at 375px — needs a rendered viewport.
- Whether a JS-handled form posts anywhere — needs a submitted request.