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Google cut the Search profiles follower threshold to 10,000 on 16 September 2026 and, alongside that, published guidance telling site owners to add a follow badge to their own site. It is the kind of thing that reaches this spec as "should we cover it". It should not. The badge is an anchor wrapping an SVG Google supplies, placed per Google's brand guidelines. Nothing parses it, no second consumer honours it, and the only auditable outcome is that an image is present. That is a vendor affordance rendered on your page, not a property of your website. Recorded as out-of-scope, and useful as the reference case for the distinction: the real question underneath — how a site asserts that an off-site profile is its own — already has vendor-neutral answers in link relations and `Organization`/`sameAs` structured data, which is what a page here would describe. Revisit if the badge is ever replaced by markup a site can be checked for. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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What changed
Adds one entry to the
/considered/register: Google Search profile badges,reason: out-of-scope.Why now
Google cut the follower threshold for claiming a Search profile to 10,000 on 16 September 2026, and published Add a Search profile badge to your website (last updated 2026-09-16) the same day. It surfaced in the daily standards scan via the Google Search Central updates feed, and it is the kind of "should the spec cover this?" question that will keep arriving, so it gets recorded rather than silently dropped.
Why it does not earn a spec page
The badge is an anchor wrapping an SVG Google supplies:
No markup, no structured data, no well-known URI, no negotiation. Nothing parses it, no second consumer honours it, and the only thing checkable from outside is that an image is present. Per the scan's scope rule — auditable website outcome, not vendor affordance — that fails the bar in the same way a newsletter badge or an app-store button would.
The entry is written to be useful beyond this one case: the real question underneath ("how does a site assert that an off-site profile belongs to it?") already has vendor-neutral answers in registered link relations and
Organization/sameAsstructured data, which is what a page here would describe.Sources
Revisit condition
A machine-readable form of the same claim that more than one consumer reads — a registered link relation, a
rel="me"-style assertion, or structured data — rather than a downloadable image governed by one vendor's brand guidelines.Verification
npm run buildpasses; pre-commit (eslint, prettier, skill-drift) clean. No spec page, changelog entry, or OG image is involved —/considered/entries are a single file.🤖 Generated with Claude Code