Opportunity Technical SEO
URL contains non-ASCII characters
- Severity
- Opportunity
- Impact
- Low
- Effort to fix
- Medium
- Issue code
url_non_ascii
Why it matters
Special characters must be encoded in URLs, which can break links in some tools and emails.
How to fix it
Use plain ASCII letters, numbers and hyphens in URLs.
How it affects your score
Finding this issue on any page costs the Technical SEO score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.
Find the affected URLs
Open Crawl > Issues and pick URL contains non-ASCII characters. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (medium), and in the issues CSV under the code url_non_ascii. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.