cnn.com website review

Not measured in this review.

• Tap response (INP) held steady for real visitors

  -3%

  Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 152 ms to 146 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

• Largest content (LCP) held steady for real visitors

  -6%

  Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.6 s to 1.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

• Page weight: 2.5 MB

  2.5 MB

  Your homepage downloads 2.5 MB on a phone, 180 KiB of it images (7%). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

• About 0.7 g of CO₂ per visit

  0.72 g

  By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.72 g of CO₂e: 86.4 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

• 5 links without text

  5 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

• 1 form field without a label

  1 form field has no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

• No H1 headline

  There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

• Only 0 internal links

  The homepage links to only 0 pages on your own site, so visitors and crawlers find few routes into the rest of it.

• Open Graph partly set

  Open Graph is missing og:description, so shared links fall back to guesses.

  View source

• robots.txt blocks 6 AI answer engine crawlers

  6 of 6

  Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Perplexity (Perplexity-User). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

• Most text only appears after JavaScript runs

  0%

  A phone browser shows 486 words, but the HTML your server sends has only 0. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read that HTML without running JavaScript, so they see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering fixes it.

• No Organization structured data

  There is no Organization (or LocalBusiness) JSON-LD, so search engines and AI assistants have no machine-readable facts about who runs the site: its name, logo, profiles and contact details.

  View source

• No llms.txt

  There is no /llms.txt, a short Markdown guide to your key pages for AI tools (llmstxt.org). It is optional and few AI tools read it yet, so treat it as a cheap extra.

• Opted out of AI training for 5 crawlers

  robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot, which collect pages to train models. That's a legitimate choice and doesn't by itself stop the site appearing in AI answers.

• 3 JavaScript errors while loading

  3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

• No HSTS header

  No Strict-Transport-Security header, so browsers may still try plain http first on a return visit.

• No Referrer-Policy

  No Referrer-Policy header, so full URLs can leak to the sites you link to.

• No Permissions-Policy

  No Permissions-Policy header to switch off camera, microphone and location for embedded content.

• Deprecated X-XSS-Protection

  X-XSS-Protection is set to “1; mode=block”; the header is deprecated and can introduce bugs. Use 0 or remove it.

• No security.txt

  There is no /.well-known/security.txt telling researchers how to report a security problem to you.

• No CAA record

  cnn.com has no CAA record, so any certificate authority may issue a certificate for it. A CAA record naming your provider (for example letsencrypt.org) closes that door.

• DNSSEC is off

  cnn.com's DNS answers are not signed. DNSSEC stops attackers forging them to send visitors or email elsewhere; most registrars switch it on in a click, though most sites still run without it.

• No calls to action

  We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

• No social proof

  No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

• No direct contact details

  No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

• No form on the homepage

  There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

• No risk reducer

  No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

• About 486 words of copy

  The homepage carries about 486 words of visible text.

• Email authentication score: 95/100

  Email authentication: SPF record 25 points, plus 15 when it ends in -all (10 for ~all); DMARC record 25, plus 25 for a reject policy (15 for quarantine); a DKIM key on a common selector 10.

• 11 cookies set on arrival

  11

  Opening the homepage sets 11 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

• No consent tool detected

  No known cookie consent tool loads with the page. Some sites build their own banner, and some only show one to visitors from the EU.

• 9 other companies contacted

  Loading the homepage contacts 9 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.