A list served as a fact when it is empty
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Rule · bucket: judgment · severity: note · detector: none · since: v0.14.0
Section: Things to avoid
Group: Search and sharing

Forbidden:
  A sitemap that renders with no entries because a content read failed, asserting the site has nothing

Instead:
  Concatenate the static routes unconditionally, and let a failed read yield the stale list rather than an empty one. When a list is genuinely empty, prove it before shipping.

An empty sitemap is not a missing sitemap. It is a positive claim, and the crawler believes it.