Adding SEO Checks to CI/CD Without Slowing Down Your Pipeline

We had a deploy last quarter that removed the canonical tags from about 200 pages. Nobody noticed for three weeks. By the time we caught it, Google had indexed duplicate versions of every page, and our organic traffic dipped 15%. The fix took 10 minutes. The recovery took 6 weeks. This is why i think SEO checks belong in CI/CD. But every time i bring this up, the reaction from other devs is the same: "We tried running Lighthouse in CI and it added 4 minutes to every build." Yeah. Dont do that. Why Lighthouse in CI Is the Wrong Approach Lighthouse is a browser-based audit tool. Running it in CI means spinning up a headless Chrome instance, loading every page, running a full performance audit, accessibility checks, SEO checks, and generating reports. It is comprehensive and also incredibly slow. For a CI pipeline that runs on every PR, you dont need comprehensive. You need fast and focused. According to web.dev's Lighthouse documentation, a single Lighthouse run takes 15-45 seconds per p