Run Types & Engines

Site Audit executes checks using individual analysis engines. You configure how these engines run by selecting a Run Type.

Run types

Mincemeat provides four run types depending on your monitoring objective:

Run Type	Included Engines	Headline Score	Best Use Case
FAST	Lighthouse (mobile + desktop), Technical SEO, Security headers	No	Fast check for core layout and experience metrics.
STANDARD	Lighthouse, Technical SEO, Security headers, Links	No	Standard crawl check without generative engine checks.
FULL	Lighthouse, Technical SEO, Security headers, Links, GEO / AI search	Yes (when all runs succeed)	Baseline audits, recurring tracking, and readiness reporting.
CUSTOM	User-selected subset of engines and configuration	Yes (if all five required engines are included and succeed)	Fine-grained custom settings, such as crawling caps or targeting specific pages.

NOTE

Schedules always create FULL jobs so that historical trend points remain comparable over time.

---

Analysis engines

Each engine inspects a specific facet of your target page.

1. Lighthouse (LIGHTHOUSE)

Runs PageSpeed Insights (PSI) checks to simulate real-world mobile and desktop loading characteristics.

• Metrics recorded: First Contentful Paint (FCP), Speed Index, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
• Aesthetic reports: Collects a simulated device viewport screenshot of the loaded page.
• Execution notes: PageSpeed Insights runs in Google-managed lab environments. Transient network conditions on the public internet may cause minor variances in scores.

2. Security Headers (SECURITY_HEADERS)

Evaluates the presence and configuration of response headers returned by your web host. Strong headers defend against cross-site scripting (XSS), framing attacks, and credential leaks.

• Headers analyzed:
  • Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS)
  • Content-Security-Policy (CSP)
  • X-Frame-Options
  • X-Content-Type-Options
  • Referrer-Policy
  • Permissions-Policy

3. Technical SEO (SEO)

Probes the target page and common metadata files to verify basic crawlability and search visibility indicators.

• Checks executed:
  • Valid HTML heading structure (<h1> count and nested hierarchy).
  • Essential meta tags (document title, meta description, viewport layout).
  • Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image).
  • Presence and parse validity of /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml.

4. Link Integrity (LINKS)

Crawls the primary target HTML, extracts all links, and checks for same-origin routing errors.

• Methodology: Performs outbound HTTP requests using the bot identity MincemeatAuditBot/1.0. It respects robots.txt crawling directives and applies strict redirect limits to locate:
  • Broken anchors (HTTP 404 and similar errors).
  • Server faults (HTTP 5xx errors).
  • Redirect chains and loop thresholds.
  • Skips external (cross-origin) links to prevent resource abuse.

5. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Evaluates page attributes to optimize visibility in LLM-based search engines, AI search engines, and generative crawlers.

• Details:
  • LLM Context Files: Verifies the presence and size of /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt files.
  • Crawler Policy: Evaluates robots.txt access directives for model training and indexing bots (e.g., GPTBot).
  • Page Evidence: Inspects canonical absolute URLs, JSON-LD structured data types, headings without IDs, semantic landmarks, unlabelled form fields, and semantic controls.
• Scoring impact: The GEO score is a first-class component under the site-readiness@1 model, contributing 20% of the composite score.

Related

• Running manual or scheduled audits
• Understanding reports and scores