DocsDiscoverabilityHTTP Link header
HTTP Link header
Relations declared in headers, readable without parsing the body.
Set up HTTP Link header on your site
How to send discovery relations in the HTTP response, and which relations agents actually read.
Free
Set up Link headers
Why an agent cares
A Link header is the cheapest thing an agent can read: it arrives with the response and needs no HTML parse. A malformed field is worse than none, because a conforming parser drops the whole header rather than the bad part.
Adoption
Web baseline. Standard equipment on the web. Its absence is the exception rather than its presence.
Direction of travel: ► flat, as at .
RFC 8288 is standard HTTP machinery, used for canonical, preload and API pagination.
What we check
Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only once
linkHeaderPresent is true, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 5 of these 5 can fail it. In a Lumar crawl these land on the page's own row.| Check | Severity | Raises | On whose authority |
|---|---|---|---|
linkHeaderMalformedSyntax | medium | conformance, usability | specification (RFC 8288) |
linkHeaderMissingRel | medium | conformance, usability | specification (RFC 8288) |
linkHeaderInvalidUri | medium | conformance, usability | specification (RFC 8288) |
linkHeaderDuplicateRel | low | conformance, usability | specification (RFC 8288) |
linkHeaderInvalidRel | low | conformance, usability | specification (RFC 8288) |
Specifications
| Document | Revision | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| RFC 8288 — Web Linking | RFC 8288 | specification |
| RFC 9110 §5.6.2 / §5.6.4 — tokens and quoted strings | RFC 9110 | specification |
| specification.website — agent-readiness link patterns | living | guidance |
Last re-read against the published documents: .