Uppercase and lowercase URLs: Crawl Audit check 44

Short answer: the domain part of a URL isn't case-sensitive, but the path after it is. To Google, /Pricing and /pricing are two different URLs. Check 44 warns when the audited page's path contains capital letters. Keep paths lowercase and you never have to think about it.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: the path is all lowercase.
• Warning: it contains uppercase letters.

Why case matters

• The standard (RFC 3986): "the scheme and host are case-insensitive", so DevMarDe.com and devmarde.com are the same site. The rest of the URL is "assumed to be case-sensitive".
• Google: "Google treats both /APPLE and /apple as distinct URLs with their own content". Its advice: "convert all text to the same case so it's easier for Google to determine that URLs reference the same page."
• robots.txt too: Google's robots.txt spec notes the file's URL "is (like other URLs) case-sensitive". A rule for /Admin/ doesn't cover /admin/.

The common way this goes wrong: a page is published as /About-Us, someone links to /about-us, and the server either returns 404 or shows the same page at both addresses.

How to fix it

• New pages: lowercase slugs only.
• Existing mixed-case URLs: move them to lowercase and add a permanent redirect from the old address.
• Links: make sure menus, sitemaps and canonical tags all use the lowercase form.

On your platform

• WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: slugs are generated in lowercase by default. Check any you edited by hand.
• Next.js: the URL follows your folder names, so name route folders in lowercase.

Sources

• Google Search Central, URL structure best practices (updated 10 December 2025) and How Google interprets the robots.txt specification, checked 3 October 2026.
• IETF, RFC 3986, section 6.2.2.1.