Why does heading order matter?
Headings are the outline of your page, and an outline only works if the levels nest. Skipping from a top-level heading straight to a third-level one tells anything reading structurally that a section is missing, when really it was a styling decision.
What it actually is
If you stripped every word from a well-structured page and kept only the headings, you should be left with something that reads like a table of contents. That is precisely what crawlers, screen readers and answer engines extract. The visual size of a heading is a design choice; the level is a statement about what belongs inside what.
Why it matters
Answer engines increasingly quote sections rather than pages, and the heading structure is how they decide where a section begins and ends. A clean outline means a passage can be lifted with its context intact and attributed to you. A broken one means your content is harder to excerpt, so it gets excerpted less — you are not penalised, you are simply passed over for something easier to use.
What good looks like
A single top-level heading, then subheadings that descend one level at a time, with no gaps. Each heading genuinely introduces the content beneath it rather than decorating it, and a reader skimming only the headings would come away with an accurate summary of the page.
Being honest about it
On a short page with a handful of sections this barely matters and we will say so. It becomes genuinely important on long-form content, documentation and anything you hope will be quoted — which is exactly the content most worth investing in. It also happens to be one of the few technical signals with a direct, non-hypothetical accessibility benefit, which is worth something on its own.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure is styling by level: a designer needs smaller text, reaches for a lower heading, and the outline acquires a hole. It is invisible on the rendered page and obvious to anything reading the structure. The second is the heading used for emphasis mid-paragraph, which inserts a phantom section break into the outline and splits a coherent passage into two incoherent ones.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 63% of the sites we could read passed the “Logical heading order” check.
Next.js sites pass it most often, at 74%. WordPress sites pass it least often, at 52%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it went from 71% to 74%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Goes with
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Sites that pass this are 2.5 times as likely to pass the “security.txt is published” check too. 6% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 2% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are twice as likely to pass the “Core security headers are set” check too. 9% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 5% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 1.5 times as likely to pass the “Content usage preferences declared” check too. 4% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 3% of the sites that do not.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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