Non-ASCII characters in the URL
What it is
The page’s URL, as your sitemap lists it, contains characters outside the basic ASCII set: accented letters such as é or ü, symbols such as ®, or letters from other scripts, as in /café-menu. A URL can only carry these in percent-encoded form, where é becomes %C3%A9.
Why it matters
Browsers encode these characters for visitors, and Google asks for non-ASCII characters in URLs to be percent-encoded. Trouble starts in the software in between: an unencoded address in a sitemap, email or document can be encoded differently by different tools, which produces two addresses for one page or a broken link. Slugs in the reader’s own language are legitimate; what matters is that they are encoded the same way everywhere.
How Asky checks it
Asky checks the page’s full URL exactly as your sitemap lists it: domain, path and query string. The page is reported when any character falls outside the ASCII range. A URL the sitemap lists already percent-encoded is not reported, and neither is a domain written in its xn-- form. The uppercase check leaves percent-encoding out, so an accented path is not also reported as uppercase. The check runs in every audit, including audits of selected pages, on every page whose HTML Asky fetched; a page answering 4xx or 5xx is reported for its status alone. A URL that redirects to another audited page reports only the redirect.
Reported as a warning with low severity.
How to fix it
- Make your sitemap list the address percent-encoded,
/caf%C3%A9-menurather than/café-menu. Check the output of your sitemap generator or plugin, since that is where the form comes from. - Use the same encoded form in canonical tags, hreflang tags and internal links, so every reference names one URL.
- If readers do not need the local spelling, or the character is a symbol copied from a product name such as
®, switch to an ASCII slug like/cafe-menu. Add a 301 from the old URL, list the new one in the sitemap and canonical tag, and update internal links, or they are reported as links to internal redirects. - To leave it as it is: if your sitemap tool cannot encode URLs and the pages are indexed as expected, mark the issue resolved.
Example
The sitemap lists https://example.com/café-menu. Listing https://example.com/caf%C3%A9-menu names the same page in the form every tool reads the same way.