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charset.late

InfoSEO audit

The character encoding is declared after the first 1024 bytes, where the HTML spec requires it, and the Content-Type header does not declare it.

What to change

Put <meta charset="utf-8"> first in <head>, before any script, style or comment, or send the encoding in the Content-Type header (text/html; charset=utf-8).

The documentation on html.spec.whatwg.org

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on every SEO audit: of a page, a crawl, a build directory or HTML. Info is a best practice: worth doing, rarely urgent, and --no-info leaves it out. Each finding takes 1 point off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check audit https://example.com --rule charset.late

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_audit_page:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "charset.late"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable charset.late on the command, or disableRules: ["charset.late"] to a tool.

All 12 rules