Non-ASCII Characters in URL

What This Means

The URL contains non-ASCII characters — characters outside the basic ASCII range (0x00-0x7F), such as accented Latin characters (é, ü, ñ), Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc. — that are not percent-encoded.

Why It Matters for SEO

Non-ASCII characters in URLs (called Internationalized Domain Names or IRIs) must be percent-encoded when transmitted in HTTP requests. Browsers typically handle this automatically for user-facing display, but many systems that process URLs — crawlers, link checkers, analytics tools — may not consistently encode them. Unencoded non-ASCII URLs can cause link breakage and inconsistent crawl behavior.

What the Platform Checks

Checks URL path characters against the ASCII range. Fires when non-ASCII characters are found.

How to Fix It

• Prefer using transliterated, ASCII-only URL slugs even for non-English content: /produkt/ rather than /Produkt/ for German content.
• If non-ASCII URLs must be used: ensure your server percent-encodes them correctly in all link outputs and that your CMS generates correctly encoded URL versions.
• For new international sites: decide on a URL strategy early — subdirectories with transliterated slugs are the most compatible approach.