We audited 49 Show HN launches. 38 had a critical bug on day one.
Originally published on the Prufa blog . In June 2026 we pointed Prufa's free audit at 50 products that had just launched on Show HN — every launch from the previous 30 days that earned at least 10 points. These are products at their moment of maximum attention: front page, real traffic, founders watching the comments. The headline numbers, from the 49 audits that completed (one site couldn't be reached by our runner): 100% of the 49 launches had at least one machine-verified finding. 78% — 38 of 49 — had at least one critical finding. 40 critical and 61 warning findings in total, every one verified by deterministic checks against captured browser evidence. No site is named in this post. The point isn't to embarrass anyone — it's that these failures are systematic, and if these teams have them on launch day, you probably do too. Methodology, briefly Each site got the same audit a free Prufa run does: a real browser loads the public pages, captures network traffic, console output, cookies, and response codes, and a fixed suite of deterministic checks grades the evidence. Same input, same verdict. Every number below is from a code-verified check — no LLM opinions are counted anywhere in this data. One honest caveat: our export keeps only the top findings per site, so the per-issue counts below are floors , not totals. The real numbers are equal or worse. What actually breaks at website launch: the numbers Sites affected (of 49) Finding Severity 38 No analytics events detected critical 24 No canonical link on entry page info 22 Cookies set without the Secure attribute warning 14 Broken links warning 12 No <h1> heading on entry page info 11 No robots.txt info 10 JavaScript console errors during page load warning 10 Missing meta description warning 8 Images missing alt text info 7 Missing Open Graph tags info 3 Tag container loads, but no analytics events fire warning 2 Canonical URL pointing to a different host critical The most common launch bug: analytics that record