False positive on Title and Description Meta tags missing

[veler]

FAQ

• Yes, my issue is not about variability or throttling.
• Yes, my issue is not about a specific accessibility audit (file with axe-core instead).
• Yes, my issue is not answered by other FAQs.

URL

https://guessitdaily.com/

What happened?

Hello,
I tested my website with Lighthouse Chrome extension, PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest. The Chrome extension and PageSpeed Insights (but NOT WebPageTest) show the same problem: <title> and description meta are missing on my website.

PageSpeed Insights:

Lighthouse:

WebPageTest:

I'm scratching my head on whether it's an issue with my website or with LightHouse. I'm worried search engine fail at crawling my website correctly and would love to find the bottom of this. Google Search Console does show that the title and description tags are present, but at this point I don't know what to trust:

What did you expect?

I'm not quite sure whether the problem is within my website, or a bug in Lighthouse. My website definitely provides a title and meta, but is there something on it blocking LightHouse from reading them? And does Google Search relies on this result for ranking?

What have you tried?

My main concern is about the SEO of my website so I worked on it the past few days to ensure Title and Description tags are rendered right away using pre-rendering (my website is made with .NET Blazor Server).

I also checked the Google Search Console and do not see any important issue related to this.

How were you running Lighthouse?

PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, Chrome DevTools

Lighthouse Version

Likely v12.3.0

Chrome Version

126.0.6478.261

Node Version

No response

OS

Windows

Relevant log output

[adamraine]

I can reproduce this with PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome extension, but not Lighthouse in DevTools or the Lighthouse CLI.

An important difference between these clients is that PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome extension will render the page on a server using the Chrome headless shell, whereas Lighthouse in DevTools and the CLI will render the page in your local environment using a normal Chrome browser. Usually if there is a difference in results, this is the reason why.

However, I checked the results of PSI and this page is still delivering a title & description in the main document. @veler any chance those elements are removed by the page when it detects a user agent with HeadlessChromium in it? I can't reproduce this issue on other pages.

[adamraine]

Well, I just tried using headless shell locally, which didn't reproduce the issue. So I'm guessing the bug is somewhere in PSI/Lightrider

[veler]

Hi @adamraine , thank you for your insights here!

I checked the results of PSI and this page is still delivering a title & description in the main document

Where do you see this in PageSpeed Insights? Is that something I can check myself??

any chance those elements are removed by the page when it detects a user agent with HeadlessChromium in it?

Not as far as I know. As I mentioned my website is made with .NET 9.0 Blazor Server, and there's no much more configuration than the default one. I'd be surprised if that was a thing. Is there a way I could verify or reproduce this behavior on my local environment?

Well, I just tried using headless shell locally, which didn't reproduce the issue. So I'm guessing the bug is somewhere in PSI/Lightrider

That's quite interesting!

[adamraine]

Where do you see this in PageSpeed Insights? Is that something I can check myself??

I was looking through an internal debug tool so unfortunately you can't check this yourself.

Not as far as I know. As I mentioned my website is made with .NET 9.0 Blazor Server, and there's no much more configuration than the default one. I'd be surprised if that was a thing. Is there a way I could verify or reproduce this behavior on my local environment?

Well having a way to reproduce this locally would be super helpful haha. I don't have a way to reproduce it unfortunately.

[veler]

Sounds good, thank you for your quick response and help! :-)