Checks

Trailing-slash consistency

Checks that the site consistently uses (or consistently omits) a trailing slash on its URLs, rather than mixing both styles across different pages.

Updated 2026-07-19minorURL Hygiene

What this check looks for

This site-wide check looks at crawled, successfully-loaded URLs whose final path segment isn't a filename (no file extension), splitting them into ones ending with a slash and ones that don't. If there are fewer than two qualifying URLs, or if every qualifying URL uses the same style, it passes. If both styles appear, it warns, listing the minority-style URLs as the ones most likely to need fixing.

Why it matters

/products/headphones and /products/headphones/ are technically two different URLs to a web server and, without a canonical or redirect tying them together, potentially two different URLs to a search engine too — mixing both styles across a site multiplies the number of distinct URLs that could serve the same content, spreading thin whatever ranking signal that content earns. It's usually not a deliberate choice but an artifact of different page templates or CMS sections being configured independently over time. AI crawlers face the same ambiguity when a domain's URLs don't follow one predictable pattern, making it harder to recognize which variant is the canonical one to reference.

How to fix it

Pick one style sitewide and 301-redirect the other:

txt
# Mixed styles across the site
https://www.acme.com/audio/headphones
https://www.acme.com/audio/speakers/

# Consistent (no trailing slash), with the other style redirected
https://www.acme.com/audio/headphones
https://www.acme.com/audio/speakers

Configure this once at the web server or framework routing layer so every URL, regardless of which template or section generated it, follows the same convention automatically.

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