What’s new here

Lighthouse runs entirely on your local Chrome install. Results are never processed or beaconed to a remote server. It also separates artifact gathering from auditing: run with -G to collect artifacts from the browser and save them, then run with -A to audit the saved artifacts without touching the live site again.

What it does

Point Lighthouse at a URL and it loads the page in a controlled Chrome session, throttled to simulate a mid-tier mobile device on a 4G connection. It collects modern performance metrics, then checks accessibility, SEO, and general best practices. Output is HTML, JSON, or CSV.

Four audit categories ship out of the box: performance, accessibility, best-practices, and SEO. You can run all of them or pass --only-categories to run one. The plugin API lets you add custom gatherers and audits when the built-in set doesn’t cover your domain.

Beyond the CLI, Lighthouse is embedded in Chrome DevTools under its own panel, available as a Chrome extension, and importable as a Node module for programmatic use in build pipelines or test suites.

Who it’s for

Frontend developers who want a quick read on a page’s performance or accessibility without signing up for a monitoring service. CI engineers who want to gate deployments on Lighthouse score thresholds. Agencies and consultants who need a reproducible, auditable baseline report to show a client.

Try it

Requires Node 22 (LTS) or later.

npm install -g lighthouse
lighthouse https://airhorner.com/

For a JSON report instead of HTML:

lighthouse https://airhorner.com/ --output json --output-path ./report.json

To gather artifacts now and audit later:

lighthouse http://example.com -G
lighthouse http://example.com -A

How mature is it

Created in March 2016, actively maintained by the Google Chrome team. 30,875 stars, 9,764 forks, 100+ contributors, 100+ releases, 88 commits in the last 90 days. Last push was 2026-10-10. Licensed Apache-2.0.