Introducing Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse v1.4.1

Today, we're announcing the general release of Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse v1.4.1. The major highlights of this release are:
A number of smaller enhancements and fixes are also included. For complete details, see the changelog on GitHub. Additional Lighthouse changes included in this release can be found in the v6.5.0 release notes.

Helping ensure Google Publisher Tags are used correctly

The Google Publisher Tag (GPT) library is designed with flexibility in mind, to support displaying ads across the widest variety of sites. However, this flexibility means that sites sometimes end up using the library in unexpected ways or provide configurations that don't quite work the way they intend. Although the library throws various warnings and errors when these sorts of issues are encountered, they can be easy to miss if you're not looking for them. To help raise awareness, we're introducing two new audits:
  • deprecated-api-usage - this audit looks for usage of GPT API features that have been deprecated. These features may be removed in the future and are no longer actively maintained. Consult the GPT release notes for alternatives to use.
  • gpt-errors-overall - this audit surfaces all warnings and errors thrown by GPT during page load. The severity of these issues can vary depending on a number of factors, so you need to review the results and decide whether there's anything that needs to be addressed for your site.

These new audits are being presented as informational only in this release, so they won't affect scores right now. However, we plan to give these audits weights in a future release. Users are therefore encouraged to address any newly uncovered issues now, to avoid a negative impact on their scores later.

Try it out and let us know what you think

Publisher Ads Audits v1.4.1 is available to use right now. You can try generating an updated report from the web app, or grab the latest CLI release from GitHub or npm to run locally. Updates to the Chrome DevTools version will land in Chrome Stable with the Chrome 91 release (est. May 2021).

Have questions about this or anything else Ad Speed related? Interested in contributing? Visit our GitHub repo.


 - Jonathon Imperiosi, Publisher Ads Audits Team