The Site Clinic Standard.
The Site Clinic Standard is an open, checkable definition of a production-ready website: it meets WCAG 2.1 AA, it follows Google’s indexing rules, and it satisfies the AI Instrumentation Contract so AI crawlers can find and read it. The standard is the gate set — if a build passes gate:all, the site meets it. The gates are open source under Apache-2.0 in build-websites-tools. You do not need a Site Clinic subscription to use them or to meet the standard.
Five build-time gates, plus a parity meta-gate.
gate-ada runs axe-core against every configured route in a real browser; the build fails on any critical, serious, or moderate violation.
gate-seo enforces HTTP 200, no noindex, canonical correctness, sitemap/route consistency, full structural metadata, and JSON-LD presence at build time.
gate-ai-instrumentation (runtime) and gate-ai-instrumentation-source (static) verify per-bot robots rules, a valid llms.txt, an AI ingestion endpoint, and a homepage JSON-LD baseline.
gate-conversion-instrumentation-source checks that a consent-independent conversion-event relay is wired so a visitor's action can actually be measured. Added per-site once a site has a conversion relay.
gate-dashboard-parity composes the readiness gates and fails the build, naming the gap, if a site is missing any surface a Site Clinic dashboard would read.
A failing gate fails the build. A failing build does not deploy. The same gates run on every site Site Clinic builds. License: Apache-2.0. “Site Clinic” is a trademark of John Liddy and is not licensed under Apache-2.0.
A self-assertion.
- ✓A self-assertion by the adopter that their own build passes the open gates (gate:all) in their CI.
Not a seal of approval.
- ×It is NOT a certification.
- ×It is NOT an audit.
- ×It is NOT an endorsement by Site Clinic.
- ×It is NOT proof that the adopter's live site is monitored by Site Clinic.
Display the badge only while your CI actually runs gate:all. The badge links here so anyone can read exactly what it claims.
What Site Clinic adds on top.
The gates verify a site once, at build time, then exit. They are free and yours. Site Clinic is the paid service that watches the live site over time. Open-source users get the gates — not the monitoring, the dashboard, or the tracking below.
The gates verify a site at build time. Site Clinic watches the live site after deploy and catches drift the build can no longer see.
Repeated accessibility, SEO, and AI-surface scans on a schedule — not a one-time build check.
Dated, inspectable evidence of what was checked and what changed, suitable for an owner, client, or attorney to read.
Tracking of AI crawler hits and whether AI answers cite the site over time — beyond anything a build-time gate measures.
A single surface across every monitored site: current state, history, alerts when production drifts away from what the gates verified at build.
From passing gates to ongoing proof.
If your build passes the open gates, the next step is keeping it that way in production. Connect your live site to Site Clinic monitoring: start a trial on the pricing page, attach your site’s URL in the customer dashboard, and the first scan completes shortly after. You then have runtime telemetry on top of the build-time gates — and an alert when production drifts from what the gates verified.