Draftcamp

Heading structure analyzer

See a page outline the way a crawler builds it, with the hierarchy breaks and thin sections marked

Enter a URL to see its outline

Every heading, its depth, the words underneath it, and where the hierarchy breaks.

Your outline is the machine-readable summary of the page

Strip a page to its headings and you should still be able to tell what it covers. That skeleton is what assistive technology navigates by, and increasingly it is what an answer engine uses to decide which passage answers a question - heading as question, the text below it as answer.

What breaks that

  • Skipped levels. H2 straight to H4 leaves a hole. The H4 now belongs to nothing, and the tree an extractor builds is wrong.
  • Multiple H1s. Legal in HTML5, still ambiguous. One page, one statement of what it is about.
  • Thin sections. Under about 40 words and the heading is decoration - it promises an answer the section does not contain.
  • Bloated sections. Over 400 words and the answer is buried somewhere in the middle, which is exactly what does not get extracted.
  • Headings used for styling. An H3 chosen because it looked the right size is invisible to a reader and misleading to a parser.

The 120-180 word band

That range is what our GEO scorer measures section depth against. It is enough to answer a question properly and short enough that the answer stays findable. It is a guide, not a rule - but a page where most sections sit far outside it usually has a structural problem rather than a length problem.

Raw HTML only

This reads what your server returns, before JavaScript. If a page shows no headings here but plenty in a browser, that gap is the finding: AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so the outline they build is the empty one.

For the full picture, run the AI visibility checker, which scores structure alongside nine other dimensions.

Common questions

Does heading structure affect rankings?
Indirectly and modestly. Headings are a relevance signal, but the larger effect is on extraction: answer engines use the heading as the question and the text beneath it as the answer. A broken hierarchy makes it ambiguous which text answers which heading, and ambiguous content does not get quoted.
Can I use more than one H1?
HTML5 permits it and screen readers cope, but one H1 per page remains the safer choice. It states unambiguously what the page is about, which matters more now that machines are parsing your outline to decide what the page answers.
Why flag a jump from H2 to H4?
Because it leaves a hole in the outline. Assistive technology navigates by heading level, and extraction builds a tree from it - a missing level makes the H4 look like a child of nothing. Skipping levels for visual size is what CSS is for.
How many words should a section have?
Roughly 120 to 180 is the band we score against. Under about 40 there is not enough to answer anything, and the heading is acting as decoration. Over 400 the answer is buried and the section wants splitting.
Does this see headings added by JavaScript?
No. It reads the raw HTML your server returns, because that is what AI crawlers see. If your outline is assembled client-side, this shows you what they actually get - which is the useful answer even though it is not what your browser shows.