Homepage status code 200: Crawl Audit check 96

Short answer: every page answers with a status code. 200 means "here it is"; 404 means "not found"; 500 and similar mean the server broke. Check 96 fails if your homepage, after redirects, returns anything but 200. It's high impact: a homepage that errors can't be indexed, and visitors see an error page.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Crawl Audit follows any redirects (checks 48 to 50) and reads the status of the final homepage response.
• Pass: 200. Fail: anything else, with the code shown.

What Google says

• 2xx: "Google considers the content for processing", though "an HTTP 2xx (success) status code doesn't guarantee indexing."
• 3xx: "By default, Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops."
• 4xx: "Google doesn't index URLs that return a 4xx status code, and URLs that are already indexed and return a 4xx status code are removed from the index."
• 5xx: "5xx and 429 server errors prompt Google's crawlers to temporarily slow down with crawling. For Google Search, already indexed URLs are preserved in the index, but eventually dropped."

Common causes of a bad status

• 403: a firewall or bot protection blocking automated visitors, including crawlers. Check your security settings let search and AI crawlers through.
• 404: the homepage was moved or unpublished, or the domain points at the wrong site.
• 500 or 503: the server, a plugin or a database failing, or maintenance mode left on.
• 429: rate limiting set too tight.

On devmarde.com

Our homepage returns 200. On 1 October, for about an hour, Vercel's automatic protection answered some automated requests with 403. Google's own live test still passed, but it's the kind of thing this check exists to catch.

Sources

• Google, HTTP status codes and network errors (updated 4 February 2026), checked 3 October 2026.