SH005 – DOM Fragmentation Check
Overview
Analyzes DOM size and depth: excessive nesting or too many elements can hurt performance and maintainability; too few may indicate minimal content.
Probability that AI systems use this signal: Crawlers and generative AI pipelines consume structured and visible page signals for training and inference. Assessment-specific signals (e.g. schema, canonicals, trust cues) affect how likely a page is indexed and surfaced. The probability that this assessment's signal influences AI behavior is high when the page is in a product or compliance context.
Impact on geo compliance: Passing this assessment supports geo compliance by ensuring machine-readable and visible content meet standards that reduce the risk of wrong locale, pricing, or trust in AI-generated answers. Failing can lead to non-compliant or misleading surfacing.
What We Check
- Root: html or body or soup. **_analyze_dom_structure:** recursive walk counting elements and max depth (element.name present = node).
- **Max depth > 10:** −60. **Max depth > 6:** −20.
- **Total elements > 1000:** −40. **> 500:** −15.
- **Total < 5:** −30 "Minimal DOM content detected".
Pass / Fail and Score
- **PASSED** if score >= 60.
How to Fix When It Fails
- Reduce DOM nesting; reduce total elements; ensure page has sufficient content (avoid empty/minimal DOM).
Common Issues
- Very deep nesting (e.g. div soup); huge DOM; or almost empty page.
Dependencies
None.
How to Verify
- Inspect DOM depth and node count in DevTools or parser.
Additional Resources
- Performance: avoid excessive DOM; accessibility tree