What does the HTTP status check verify?
It reads the final HTTP status code the URL returns after following any redirects, and confirms it's a genuine success response with real content. It distinguishes between several cases:
- `200 OK` with real content — the healthy state; the page is eligible to be indexed.
- 3xx redirects — a single clean
301to the final URL is fine, but a chain that resolves to 200 is a warning (it adds latency and risk). - Soft-404 — a page that returns
200but whose content is a "not found" or error message; engines may treat it as an error and drop it. - 4xx / 5xx — a client (
404,403) or server (500,503) error; the page can't be indexed.
How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?
GEObubbly requests the URL, follows the redirect chain to the final destination, and reads the status code there — then inspects the response body to catch soft-404s (a 200 paired with error-style content). It's a core check worth 3 points in Crawlability & Indexability, because a page that doesn't respond cleanly can't be crawled, indexed or cited no matter what's on it.
Why the HTTP status code matters for SEO and GEO
The status code is the page's handshake with a crawler: a clean 200 says "here's a real page, go ahead and index it." Anything else interrupts that. A 404 or 500 means the page isn't available, so it drops out of search and can't be cited by AI engines. The sneakier problem is the soft-404 — a broken or empty page that still returns 200, so monitoring tools think it's fine while search engines quietly de-index it for thin or error content. Redirect chains add their own risk: extra hops slow the page and give impatient AI fetchers more reasons to give up before reaching it. Returning a real 200 for every page you want found is the most basic crawlability requirement — get it right, then the rest of the Crawlability & Indexability signals can do their job.