A search box on your site: Crawl Audit check 131

Short answer: on a site with a big catalogue or lots of articles, a search box is how many people find things. On a small site with a handful of pages, a clear menu does the job. Check 131 is informational and always passes: it notes whether the page has a search box.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: an <input type="search">, an element with role="search", or a form whose action contains "search".
• Pass: none, with a note that search is optional for smaller sites.

What the research says

Nielsen Norman Group's long-standing advice, from 2001:

• "make search available from every page on the site; you cannot predict where users will be when they decide they are lost."
• "On homepages, search should be a type-in field and not a link."

When it's worth adding

• A shop with more than a few dozen products.
• A blog, help centre or documentation with many articles.
• Any site where your own analytics show people hunting through the menu.

Marking it up

MDN recommends wrapping the search form in a <search> element, which "creates a landmark region that assistive technologies can announce and quickly navigate to." Label the box properly (check 132).

<search>
  <form action="/search">
    <label for="q">Search the shop</label>
    <input id="q" name="q" type="search">
    <button>Search</button>
  </form>
</search>

Sources

• Nielsen Norman Group, Search: visible and simple (2001), checked 6 October 2026.
• MDN, <input type="search"> and <search>.