When are custom thresholds worth it for Footer has the required links?
When are custom thresholds warranted?
Override `footerRequirements` when your footer carries obligations the generic three do not cover. Regulated industries are the clearest case — a financial services site that must show a regulator registration number, a healthcare site with a required disclaimer, an EU-facing site that must route to cookie preferences. Write the requirement as you would explain it to a new employee, naming each element you expect to see, and the check holds every audited page to that sentence instead of the default one.
When should you stay on Standard?
Stay on Standard if your footer requirement is genuinely the common three, because rewriting the sentence to say the same thing only creates a second version to keep current. Keep the default when you are auditing many sites or brands at once and want one comparable baseline across them. If your real question is whether the footer *looks* right rather than whether it carries the required routes, the change-detection check answers that better than a rewritten requirement.
What do you trade away?
A custom requirement is only as good as its wording: the more elements you name in one sentence, the more ways a page can fail it and the less precisely the finding tells you which part was missing. Long, densely conditional requirements ("unless the page is transactional, in which case…") tend to produce findings people argue with rather than fix. You also take on maintenance — a requirement listing your regulator's number format is now something that must be updated when the regime changes, and a stale requirement fails good pages.
Community Standard vs org Custom
The Standard requirement is written to be defensible on any commercial page without configuration, which is why it stops at the three near-universal elements. A Custom requirement is your organisation's own compliance statement and should be sourced from wherever that lives — a legal checklist, a brand standard, a regulator's guidance — with an owner who reviews it. Keep the wording plain: the requirement is read by the check and by whoever has to act on the failure, and both are better served by a sentence than by a specification.
Worked override examples
A regulated lender extends `footerRequirements` so that the three usual elements are joined by its regulatory registration number, turning one audit into evidence for a compliance file. A publisher operating in the EU adds a cookie-preferences route to the requirement, because its obligation is to offer ongoing consent management, not just a policy page. A product team whose app shell deliberately ships a minimal footer narrows the requirement for those templates to a copyright notice and a privacy link, and keeps the full requirement on marketing pages.
How does an agent call it with parameters?
{
"type": "url",
"url": "https://example.com",
"validations": [
{
"id": "footer-compliance",
"parameters": {
"footerRequirements": "Footer must be visible and include a copyright notice, a privacy policy link, and terms or conditions link."
}
}
]
}