I audited 745 sitemap URLs and found two hidden indexing blockers

Google Search Console showed far fewer indexed pages than sitemap URLs across eight small Next.js tools, so I crawled every URL rather than checking only the homepages.

The 745-URL audit found 15 live pages with a placeholder canonical host and 22 sitemap pages with no internal crawl path. I fixed the canonical and breadcrumb URLs, linked every orphan page, deployed all eight sites, re-submitted all sitemaps, and crawled everything again.

The post-deployment audit now shows zero non-200 sitemap URLs, zero canonical mismatches, zero noindex pages, and zero orphan sitemap pages.

Full technical evidence: https://github.com/Gavin1901/free-browser-tools-index/blob/master/daily/2026-07-25-745-url-indexability-incident-report.md

The important caveat: sitemap and IndexNow submission improve discovery, but neither proves Google indexing. The next measurement is coverage after recrawl.