Method · Snapshot 23 October 2026
How we measure website readiness
What the snapshot is, how sites were chosen and checked, what we publish, and how to correct or remove a profile.
What it is
A single, dated check of public configuration: the homepage response and HTML, the TLS handshake, a few standard files, and public DNS records. It shows choices that make a site faster, safer and easier to find, with the fix for each gap.
What it is not
It does not measure availability or response times, and it does not follow sites over time. Live status and incident history for websites are on Status Is Down. A not-observed result is not a security finding: many practices are optional, and some sites achieve the same goal in other ways.
Which sites
We started from domains in the Status Is Down website catalog and its public website pages, and matched them with the Chrome UX Report top-sites list (October 2026 release, retrieved 23 October 2026). That list groups origins into popularity bands (top 1K, 5K, 10K, 50K, 100K, 500K, 1M) based on real Chrome usage, so it under-represents regions where Chrome is less common.
All matched sites in the top-50K bands were checked, plus a random sample of 6,000 sites from each of the 100K, 500K and 1M bands. In total 46,473 sites returned at least one measurement. Sites our classifier flagged as adult, gambling or piracy (6,378) are excluded from every published page and download, leaving 40,095.
How each site was checked
- Read robots.txt and honoured it for our user agent token
StatusIsUPReadiness. Sites that disallow it were not fetched. - Fetched the homepage once (following up to six redirects, reading at most 3 MB), and the headers of one same-site stylesheet or script.
- Requested
http://to see whether it redirects to HTTPS, plus/.well-known/security.txtand, if robots.txt listed none,/sitemap.xml. - Completed one TLS handshake to read the protocol version, HTTP/2 support and certificate dates.
- Looked up NS, CAA, DS, AAAA and DMARC records through public resolvers.
Requests identified themselves as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; StatusIsUPReadiness/1.0; +https://statusisup.com/readiness/method/), used short timeouts, made at most two connections per host, never logged in, never submitted forms and never ran page scripts. All checks ran between 2026-10-23 11:25:16 UTC and 2026-10-23 12:35:12 UTC from a single cloud location in Southeast Asia; sites with failed network attempts were retried twice at a lower rate.
Results and the readiness index
Every check has three states: observed, not observed, or not measured (blocked, challenged, disallowed, timed out or not applicable, such as image checks on homepages with few images). Not-measured checks never count against a site. The readiness index is the weighted share of measured checks that were observed, from 0 to 100. Lane scores use the same rule within each lane.
Categories
Each site was assigned to one of the 63 Status Is UP service categories by a language model reading only the site's own homepage title and description. Assignments with low confidence are left out of category statistics and profiles.
Which sites get a profile
A public profile is published only when the site is in the Chrome UX Report top 50K, has a confident category, and at least 24 of 31 checks were measured. A profile is offered to search engines only when the category is high-confidence, at least 26 checks were measured, it lists at least three site-specific fixes, and its priorities differ from the default for its category. Indexing is staged: this first release offers only profiles of sites in the top-10,000 popularity bands, and other profiles stay available to visitors but out of search results until we have reviewed how the first wave performs. Every finding on a profile states what was observed, when, its limitation and the next action.
Corrections, removal and opting out
Site owners can ask for a correction or for a profile to be removed with the Request a correction or removal button on any profile, or through the Status Is UP contact options. Removed domains are excluded from every page and download at the next build. To stop future checks, disallow the token StatusIsUPReadiness in robots.txt.
Sources and attribution
- Popularity bands: Chrome UX Report top-sites list via zakird/crux-top-lists, derived from the public Chrome UX Report dataset (CC BY 4.0).
- Domain catalog: Status Is Down website catalog.
- Benchmark download: aggregate results by band, category, stack and provider (CSV).