What does the TLS certificate check verify?
It checks the health of your site's TLS/SSL certificate beyond just having HTTPS. Specifically:
- Validity — the certificate is currently valid and issued by a trusted authority.
- Domain match — it's issued for the domain being served (not a mismatched or wildcard gap).
- Expiry window — how soon it expires, flagging certificates close to their end date so they can be renewed in time.
A valid certificate with comfortable time before expiry passes; one nearing expiry is a warning; an expired, untrusted or mismatched certificate is a fail.
How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?
GEObubbly inspects the certificate served on the live TLS connection, checking its validity, trust chain and expiry date. It's a core, scored Infrastructure check that runs server-side against the live connection.
Criteria: Pass — valid, >30 days to expiry. Warning — valid but <30 days, or chain issues. Fail — expired, self-signed, mismatched or untrusted.
Why TLS certificate health matters for SEO and GEO
This check goes a step beyond having HTTPS to the ongoing health of the certificate that makes HTTPS work. TLS certificates are issued for a fixed period and must be renewed before they expire — and an expired certificate is far worse than no padlock: modern browsers show a full-page security interstitial warning users the connection isn't private, which most people will not click past. In effect, an expired certificate takes your entire site offline for every visitor, and crawlers hitting the error will struggle to access your content too. The same hard failure happens if the certificate is untrusted (self-signed or from an unrecognised authority) or doesn't match the domain. These outages are usually self-inflicted and avoidable: certificates from providers like Let's Encrypt are typically auto-renewed, but renewal can silently break, so monitoring the expiry date is essential. For both SEO and GEO, availability is the prerequisite for everything — a site behind a certificate error can't be crawled, ranked or cited. Keeping the certificate valid and comfortably ahead of expiry protects uptime.