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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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Records Google Search profile badges as out of scope for a standalone recommendation because they use ordinary hyperlinks and images rather than a separate badge protocol.
The entry acknowledges that crawlers can process the link, identifies the destination and accessible name as checkable properties, and distinguishes a visual badge from explicit identity relationships. It removes unsupported claims about crawler behaviour and the unrelated follower threshold.
Source: Google Search Central badge guidance. No spec page or spec changelog entry is added.
Validation: local lint, formatting, Agent Skill integrity and diff checks passed. All GitHub checks that ran passed, including build, MCP, internal links, Lighthouse and dependency audits; the external-link job was skipped. The revised entry was verified in its deployed Cloudflare preview.