Site audit tool are currently flagging resources inside <template> HTML elements as broken images or invalid links, but this content should be excluded from those checks entirely.

The <template> tag is an inert HTML element by design. Its content is never rendered, never parsed for subresources, and never exposed to the user until JavaScript explicitly clones and injects it into the DOM. Placeholder values like %src% or %href% inside a template are intentional and expected at scan time.

A concrete example: on an e-commerce site, a cart sidebar component may live inside a <template> tag and be present on every page. Because the template contains image or link placeholders, audit tools flag every single page as having broken assets, resulting in an artificially low score (10% in our case). In reality, none of those resources are ever requested by the browser, and the final injected markup will always contain valid, resolved values.

Scanners should detect <template> wrappers and skip any resource validation for their contents, the same way browsers do.