The staging E2E gate's one failure. Every link to the site pasted into
a chat has been rendering bare.
Staging serves og:title, og:description, og:url, og:site_name, og:type
and twitter:card, and no og:image at all. So metadata from the layout
reaches the page; only the file convention does not.
app/opengraph-image.tsx does work — _not-found, which lives in the app
root segment, carries an og:image from it in the build output. It does
not reach the site's pages, which live in the (frontend) route group
whose own layout.tsx is the root layout. The icon conventions are not
affected: /icon.png and /apple-icon.png are both linked correctly on
the same page, verified against staging. The asymmetry is the whole
bug, and it arrived with the route-group split that Payload required.
The file stays at the app root. Moving metadata files into a route
group is what drops /robots.txt and hashes /icon.png, which CLAUDE.md
records and which this must not undo — the build still emits all four
of /robots.txt, /icon.png, /apple-icon.png and /opengraph-image. The
root layout points at the route instead, and metadataBase makes it
absolute, which the journey needs since it calls new URL() on the value.
twitter.images is set for the same reason: the card is declared
summary_large_image, and claiming a large-image card while supplying no
image is worse than claiming a summary card.
Checked before fixing that og:image was the only broken assertion in
that journey: the test aborts at line 911, so its apple-touch-icon and
maskable-icon assertions had never run. All four of those assets return
200 image/png from staging, so this does not simply move the failure
further down the test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DXnXQKnPpZBBP61fBQiFkq
Payload's admin panel ships its own root layout rendering html/body.
Next allows multiple root layouts only when no app/layout.tsx exists, so
the site's routes move into their own group. Route groups are invisible
to routing: every public URL is unchanged, verified against the build's
route table.
The metadata file conventions deliberately stay at the app/ root. Moving
them into the group renamed /icon.png to /icon-4usi79.png (likewise
apple-icon and opengraph-image) and dropped /robots.txt altogether,
which would have broken the /icon.png cache-control rule, the
outputFileTracingIncludes entry for the share card, and robots.txt.
darkThemeSafety reads app/globals.css off disk rather than importing it,
so it needed its own path fix — a grep for import specifiers misses it,
and it fails as an unrunnable suite rather than a failed assertion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
The baseline says these pages already rank and are not clicked. 'compare
school performance' sits at position 6.1 with 0.43% CTR; 'compare schools' at
7.2 with 0.87%. The brand query 'school compare' draws 9.16% from the same
neighbourhood of the same results page, which rules out a ranking explanation
— when the snippet gives a reason to click, it gets clicked.
These SERPs are owned by the DfE's own 'Compare school performance' service.
The old title put a lowercase brand nobody searches for in the most valuable
pixels, then a near-paraphrase of that service's name. Beside the government's
own result it read as a lookalike.
Intent in the title, differentiator in the description. Titles now match what
people type, and the descriptions carry the one fact gov.uk does not publish:
how close you had to live to get a place.
/compare deliberately takes the tool phrasing rather than the homepage's, so
the two pages stop competing for one phrase. The root layout's default and
Open Graph copy were saying something different again; they now agree.
No hard school counts in any of it. The corpus moves with every data refresh
and this repo has already shipped one copy bug of that kind.
Tests guard the mechanics — SERP length, intent keyword, the differentiator,
no brand-first title — and leave the wording free to iterate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
25,193 schools make ~317 million pairs. The bare page stays indexable as the
landing page for the head term; the parameter space goes noindex, follow so
its outbound links still count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
The homepage read eleven search params and declared no canonical, so every
filter combination was a crawlable near-duplicate of the page we most want to
rank. Rankings and admissions declared none either.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
