Matan · SEO · Technical

Main landmark

<main> marks the unique content of the page for assistive tech and for parsers that skip chrome.

Pass condition in our engine: The page exposes <main>, role="main", or #main.

1. Problem description

Without a main landmark, screen-reader users must tab through the header on every page. Heuristic extractors (and some AI scrapers) also struggle to separate navigation from the article. It is a cheap HTML fix with outsized UX impact.

2. Most common causes

  • Legacy tables or div soup with no semantic landmarks.
  • The layout wraps everything in <div id="wrapper"> only.
  • A React app never maps the content region to <main>.

3. How to fix it

  1. Wrap the unique page body in <main id="main"> (one per page).
  2. Keep header, nav and footer outside <main>.
  3. Optionally add a skip link targeting #main.

Test this check

We fetch only this URL (plus robots.txt / llms.txt at the domain root when the check needs them). We do not crawl the rest of the site like a full report.

Scoring rules for the full site crawl are documented in methodology. Want every category at once? Generate a free report.

Get your free SEO & GEO report

Enter your URL and receive a full audit with scoring and recommendations. No sign-up required.