The main content landmark: Crawl Audit check 181

Short answer: the <main> element wraps the content that's unique to a page, everything except the header, menus and footer. Screen reader users can jump straight to it. Check 181 fails if a page doesn't have one.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a <main> element, or an element with role="main".
• Fail: neither.

Checks 182 to 184 do the same for navigation, header and footer. Together these are called landmarks.

What the sources say

• W3C: "Screen readers exploit landmark roles to provide keyboard navigation to important sections of a page."
• W3C: "Each page should have one main landmark."
• MDN: "A document mustn't have more than one <main> element that doesn't have the hidden attribute specified."
• WebAIM's 2026 survey found a main landmark on only 46.1% of top home pages.

The markup

<body>
  <header>...</header>
  <nav>...</nav>
  <main id="main">
    <h1>...</h1>
  </main>
  <footer>...</footer>
</body>

Giving it an id lets your skip link (check 178) point at it.

On devmarde.com

Our pages wrap their content in <main id="main">. It passes.

Sources

• W3C ARIA Authoring Practices, Landmark regions.
• MDN, <main>, and WebAIM, The WebAIM Million (2026), checked 6 October 2026.