What is measured
The audit looks for charset in HTML and Content-Type. UTF-8 prevents common corruption of Cyrillic and special characters.
Technical access and indexing
Document character encoding
This check confirms that browsers and crawlers can interpret page text unambiguously.
Pass criterion
The server or an early meta charset consistently declares UTF-8 on every public page.
What to fix
Add the correct charset to the document template and align it with the response Content-Type header.
Automation limit
Correct encoding does not assess content quality, but a mismatch can make text unreadable and impossible to analyse.
Reference