Keep-Alive connections: Crawl Audit check 95

Short answer: Keep-Alive lets a browser reuse one connection for several requests instead of opening a new one each time. On HTTP/1.1 it's the default, and HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 go further by sending many requests at once over one connection. Check 95 is informational: it always passes, with a note on which of these applies.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: the connection uses HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 (connection reuse is built in).
• Pass: the response has Connection: keep-alive.
• Pass: neither seen, with a note that keep-alive is standard on modern hosts.

What the standards say

• MDN: "Connection-specific header fields such as Connection and Keep-Alive are prohibited in HTTP/2 and HTTP/3."
• The HTTP/2 standard (RFC 9113): "An endpoint MUST NOT generate an HTTP/2 message containing connection-specific header fields."
• MDN notes that browsers send Connection: keep-alive "even though it's the default in HTTP/1.1."

So a missing Keep-Alive header on an HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 site is correct, not a problem.

When it matters

Only on a server stuck on HTTP/1.1 that closes the connection after every response. The real fix there is HTTP/2 (check 94). Watch the other way round too: MDN warns that Safari "does not load any response that contains them" over HTTP/2, so don't add these headers by hand on a modern server.

Sources

• MDN, Keep-Alive and Connection, checked 3 October 2026.
• IETF, RFC 9113: HTTP/2, section 8.2.2 (June 2022).