methodology / SEO / #93
Encrypted Client Hello
#93 · Variable · Web Quality · weighted · SEO · impl todo · source Cloudflare URL Scanner securityDetails.encryptedClientHello flag, captured from the Chrome DevTools network event for the page-load request.
Web Quality factor
This factor is part of Web Quality — the weighted 0..100 score that sits above Web Standards. Its weight depends on what kind of site is being measured. Web Standards items take priority; this factor only enters the score once Web Standards passes.
No matrix row defined yet — this factor falls back to a neutral weight of 1.0 across every site type until the methodology is tuned.
What this means for your business
Hides which website a visitor is opening from coffee-shop WiFi, corporate proxies, and government censors. It's a newer feature, so having it on is a real sign your site is keeping up with the modern web.
Plain title: Visitor privacy on hostile networks
Want the long version? Read the full explainer with examples →
What we measure
Encrypted ClientHello (ECH, RFC 9460) hides the SNI hostname from passive observers — a meaningful privacy upgrade for users on hostile networks (corporate proxies, censored countries, public WiFi). Cloudflare GA'd ECH for all domains in September 2023; Firefox enabled it by default in 2024. Adoption is still tiny outside of Cloudflare-fronted sites, so being on ECH is a real early-mover modernity signal.
How to improve your score
Easiest path: put your domain behind Cloudflare. ECH is automatically enabled for proxied domains. If you're self-hosting and want native ECH, you need both the publishing side (publish ECH config in HTTPS DNS RR) and a TLS terminator that supports ECH (recent BoringSSL, OpenSSL 3.4+ with the ECH branch, or NGINX with the appropriate module). Most production self-hosted setups don't support it yet — Cloudflare is the pragmatic answer in 2026.
Facts
Implementation notes
pass=100: ECH negotiated on the test connection. fail=0: ECH not used (default for the long tail of the web).
Scoring
Scoring formulas are versioned with the methodology. The current method maps raw measurements to pass, warn, fail. Factor weights determine how much each contributes to the composite — see the methodology index for the full table.
Version history
| Version | Change | Date |
|---|---|---|
| v0.1 | Factor introduced. Status: proposed. Scoring impl: todo. | 2026-04-25 |