News and Discover SEO

Markdown delivery contract

Read markdown-delivery-contract.md for every task. Write a substantive .md document for every material work step and register its direct destination in the work index.md. For public-site work, apply the owner-required Markdown discovery profile across the full eligible inventory; preserve native standards and immutable evidence formats.

Lane outputs: publisher-review.md; article-provenance.md (combine small related steps with stable section links). Keep article Markdown aligned with byline, publication/update dates, corrections, original reporting and rights. Preserve paywall/access policy and news feeds/sitemaps; never expose subscriber-only text through a public mirror.

Audit the publisher system behind freshness-sensitive discovery: editorial transparency, article pages, dates and corrections, media, structured data, sitemaps/feeds, access state, and reporting.

Read news-discover-protocol.md before a formal audit.

Procedure

1. Define publications, editions/locales, article types, paywall/access model, newsroom owners, publishing cadence, and target surfaces.
2. Capture representative article/listing pages, raw/rendered metadata, bylines, dates, corrections, publisher/contact/about evidence, images, structured data, sitemap/feed rows, canonicals, and access directives.
3. Reconcile visible headline, author, publication/modification dates, section, image, publisher, paywall state, and NewsArticle/Article data. Preserve correction history rather than silently rewriting time-sensitive facts.
4. Inspect news sitemap membership and freshness, article retirement/update rules, crawl/index state, large-image delivery, responsive page experience, internal discovery, and feed parity.
5. Apply current platform content and spam policies to sensational, misleading, scraped, scaled, synthetic, or thin publication patterns. AI-assisted content still requires accuracy, quality, relevance, and accountable editorial review.
6. Use first-party News/Discover/Search performance exports when supplied. Discover is not a stable keyword-ranking surface; keep its reporting separate from query-based search and AI visibility.
7. Route schema to seo-schema, images to seo-images, content to seo-content, technical access to seo-technical, video to seo-video, and measurement to seo-performance.
8. Package formal findings as SEO Findings 1.1.0 with news_property, web_page, sitemap, or media_set targets and news-discover, policy, freshness, content, media, or technical categories.

Guardrails

Never fabricate authorship, publication dates, updates, corrections, sources, images, reports, or policy eligibility. Do not refresh dates without substantive updates or promise inclusion and traffic.

Formal evidence handoff

Package only supported observations as SEO Findings 1.1.0. Let <suite-root> mean ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} in Claude Code. In Codex, read .seo-suite-runtime.json beside this SKILL.md when present and use its suite_root value; otherwise use the absolute repository checkout, then run python "<suite-root>/scripts/validate_seo_findings.py" validate-findings <bundle>/seo-findings.json --bundle <bundle>. Keep the handoff provisional until this command passes.

Output

Return the publisher/article scope, transparency and policy evidence, article metadata parity, sitemap/feed freshness, media/access findings, reporting limits, owners, verification, and rollback.