The staging gate was red on three journeys. All three were faults in the
tests; the site was behaving correctly in each case.
Next normalises canonical URLs against trailingSlash:false, so the homepage
ships "https://www.schoolcompare.co.uk" with no slash while every other route
keeps its path. Both address the same document. The test hardcoded the slash
and so failed only on the root — /rankings and /admissions passed throughout,
which is what made it look like a homepage bug rather than a test bug.
Compared with trailing slashes stripped from both sides.
The robots.txt assertion matched "Disallow: /" anywhere in the file and
tripped over the AI-crawler groups Cloudflare injects — ClaudeBot, GPTBot,
Amazonbot and six others all carry a blanket disallow, deliberately, and none
of them is Googlebot. It now parses the file into user-agent groups and checks
only the "*" group, which is also the thing the test was always trying to say:
Google may crawl the page, so it can see the noindex header.
Both were the same mistake as the doubled brand: asserting a naive string
rather than the semantics, and asserting against what the code assembles
rather than what the page renders.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
