SEO checks on pull requests

Relay compares a pull request's preview deployment with your live site and reports SEO regressions before you merge: a stray noindex, a changed canonical tag, a removed title, a broken link or invalid structured data. Each finding shows the page's clicks and impressions from Search Console, so you see first what would hurt real traffic.

The check reads rendered HTML, so it works with any framework.

Set it upCopy Anchor Link

1. Open Project settings → SEO checks and click Create token. Copy the token. Relay shows it once.

2. In your GitHub repository, add the token as the secret RELAY_CI_TOKEN.

3. Add this step to the workflow that deploys your preview, after the deploy step:

   Copy Text

   - uses: PlaybookMediaLLC/relay-seo-check@v1
     with:
       token: ${{ secrets.RELAY_CI_TOKEN }}
       preview-url: ${{ steps.deploy.outputs.url }}
       fail-on: blocking # blocking | warning | never

   preview-url is the URL of the deployed preview. Use the output of your deploy step.

4. Open a pull request. The job summary lists each finding with its page, rule, before and after values, and traffic.

Preview hostsCopy Anchor Link

Relay checks previews on your project's domain and its subdomains, and on *.vercel.app, *.netlify.app, *.pages.dev and *.workers.dev. To check another host, add it under Preview hosts. Relay refuses every other host.

Protected previewsCopy Anchor Link

If your previews need a secret, open Preview access and choose one method:

• A header, such as Vercel's x-vercel-protection-bypass with its value.
• A Cloudflare Access service token, with its client ID and secret.

Relay encrypts the value and sends it only to the preview host.

What blocks a mergeCopy Anchor Link

Blocking findings fail the job when fail-on is blocking:

• The page became noindex, redirects, or answers an error.
• The canonical URL changed or was removed.
• The title or meta description was removed.
• Structured data stopped parsing, or a top-level type disappeared.
• The preview robots.txt blocks a page that production allows.
• The preview sitemap is missing, or lists fewer than 90% of production's URLs.

Warnings cover changed titles, descriptions and H1s, dropped internal links, new broken links, changed hreflang, removed social tags and shrunk content. On a page with 1,000 or more impressions, or a money key page, dropped links and shrunk content also block. You can turn that off.

Relay ignores the X-Robots-Tag: noindex header that preview platforms add, unless you turn the check on.

Overrides and ignore rulesCopy Anchor Link

• To merge on purpose, add the label relay-seo-override to the pull request. The check passes, and the Activity page records the override.
• To silence a rule on some pages, add an ignore rule with the rule name and a path pattern, such as title-changed on /blog/*.

LimitsCopy Anchor Link

The free plan includes 30 checks a month; paid plans include 1,000. A check covers up to 100 pages: the pages your pull request changed, your key pages, your 30 top-traffic pages and a sample from your sitemap. If Relay cannot finish a check, or the month's checks are used up, the job prints the reason and passes, unless fail-on is warning.

Relay keeps check results for 90 days.