Arwp Search Maturity

ARWP Search Maturity

Use this specialist when the Growth Loop needs a reference cohort, not another generic checklist.

Use docs/ANTI-PATTERNS.md to review fabricated maturity, weak evidence and measurement errors; preserve unknown states and legitimate countercases. Record findings with templates/growth/anti-pattern-review.md.

Goal

Turn volatile Search/AI observations into an explainable comparison:

intent → timestamped visible references → observable evidence vector → cohort pattern → target gap → experiment → verify → measure

The output is a hypothesis generator and prioritization input. It is not a list of secret ranking factors.

Sources of truth

Read:

• docs/SEARCH-MATURITY-BENCHMARK.md;
• docs/INTERNAL-DISCOVERY-EVIDENCE.md when reviewing internalTopicalGraph;
• docs/INTENT-OWNERSHIP.md when owner query/grounding evidence may imply a new or competing canonical page;
• schema/search-maturity-corpus.schema.json;
• the relevant reviewed corpus under benchmarks/search-maturity/;
• current primary platform guidance;
• the target site's actual content, entity, Search Surface and owner evidence where available.

Workflow

1. Define the intent family first. Do not benchmark unrelated high-authority sites merely because they rank for something.
2. Resolve intent ownership before creating URLs. When owner Search/AI evidence exists, map the intent family to a reviewed disposition and zero/one/multiple canonical owners with arwp-intent-ownership. Strengthen an existing owner first; query or fan-out variation is not a page-creation instruction. Deliberately decline query mismatches instead of turning them into owner gaps.
3. Capture the visibility observation exactly. Preserve provider/surface, query, locale/device when known and observation time. Store a numeric rank only when explicit rankEvidence independently supports that exact rank.
4. Separate ownership. Independent references can inform the external cohort. ARWP-owned/project-reference sites remain implementation/dogfood evidence.
5. Review only observable dimensions. Use the 16 Search Maturity dimensions. Omit anything not actually checked; omission is unknown, never failure.
6. Classify evidence. Keep documented-platform, observed-correlation, experiment and unknown distinct.
7. Compile the cohort vector. Prefer repeated patterns and state distributions over a universal score.
8. Compare the target. A target gap is interesting only when the reference pattern is sufficiently repeated and the target evidence is real.
9. Perform applicability review. Ask whether closing the gap improves the actual user/evidence artifact. Reject cosmetic copying and cargo cult.
10. Route accepted work through existing ARWP machinery. Growth hypothesis → Adaptive Upgrade → safe transformation/manual edit → verification receipt.
11. Probe owner production surfaces after source changes. Capture the bounded HTTP/robots/noindex/canonical observation in a derived ledger. A successful probe means evidence was collected, not that production is ready.
12. Gate served intent owners separately. Run the deterministic ownership gate over the observed ledger. A served family must have exactly one currently indexable owner; preserve the proof artifact on failure. Reviewed decline families are intentionally excluded.
13. Verify source→production parity separately. Technical owner eligibility does not identify the deployed commit. Use deployment/change receipts when that distinction matters.
14. Measure external outcomes separately. Search visibility, AI retrieval/citation, referral traffic and business outcomes are different signals.
15. Preserve negative results. A change with no effect is useful evidence and should influence future priors.

Intent ownership evidence

When query, grounding or referral observations are being used to decide content architecture:

• declare the bounded intent family before reviewing phrases;
• explicitly decide whether the site should serve or decline that family;
• keep Google, Bing, referral and manual observations provider-scoped;
• treat exactly one indexable reviewed owner as owned;
• treat zero owners on a served family as a review gap, not an automatic new-page request;
• treat reviewed query/navigational mismatches as declined, with no canonical owner and an explicit reason;
• treat multiple owners as fragmented, not automatic proof of cannibalization;
• treat off-owner observations as a routing/relevance review signal, not proof of ranking harm;
• probe the public canonical inventory before claiming current technical eligibility;
• use gate on the observed ledger when CI/release policy requires every served family to be owned;
• preserve probe artifacts even when the gate fails so the failure stays inspectable;
• keep deployment commit parity independent from public HTTP eligibility;
• preserve live owner query cohorts in private target evidence rather than public ARWP fixtures.

Use docs/INTENT-OWNERSHIP.md for the full contract.

Internal topical graph evidence

When reviewing internalTopicalGraph:

• prefer rendered/runtime or matching build-artifact anchors over repository-source guesses;
• classify redirect-only aliases as URL transitions, not weak content nodes;
• count shared-renderer links in source mode only when route → renderer → visible anchor behavior is deterministic and inspectable;
• keep uncertain renderer/source relationships unknown instead of scoring them absent;
• distinguish contextual/hub/action links from global navigation and footer reachability;
• keep canonical owner identity, redirects, sitemap state and link relationships as separate observations.

Use docs/INTERNAL-DISCOVERY-EVIDENCE.md for the full contract.

Fast-riser handling

A new page observed in retrieval can help study rapid discovery, but do not infer crawl/index/rank history from publication date.

Record:

• publication date if observable;
• observation timestamp;
• retrievalAgeAtObservation;
• exact rank only with explicit rankEvidence.

Never rename age at observation to time to rank.

Dimension review

The current dimensions cover:

• retrieval clarity and topical focus;
• answer-first structure;
• evidence density and first-party evidence;
• author/entity identity and site transparency;
• semantic HTML and truthful structured data;
• internal topical graph;
• freshness and URL stability;
• multimodal evidence and external corroboration;
• real utility surfaces;
• browser-agent accessibility.

Do not force all dimensions onto every site type.

Hard rules

• Do not copy competitor prose, layouts, assets or branding.
• Do not fabricate rank, traffic, citations, backlinks, authorship, dates or evidence.
• Do not encode a cohort feature as a Google/Bing ranking factor unless the platform documents that claim.
• Do not create one page per query variant.
• Do not turn a reviewed query mismatch into a content gap merely because it generated impressions or retrieval.
• Do not infer keyword cannibalization merely because an observed query/grounding phrase lands off the reviewed owner.
• Do not treat successful probe execution as proof that served intent owners are ready; use the separate gate.
• Do not treat a passing ownership gate as proof of actual Google indexing, ranking, AI citation or deployed commit identity.
• Do not optimize the benchmark by selecting only supporting examples.
• Do not collapse unknown into zero.
• Do not hide misses or negative experiments.
• Do not score redirect aliases as isolated weak pages or literal source imports as rendered links when the renderer contract is unverified.
• Do not publish confidential algorithms, learned proprietary priors or candidate patent claims merely to document R&D.
• Do not let a single composite score drive changes.

CLI

node bin/arwp-search-maturity.mjs check \
  benchmarks/search-maturity/pilot-2026-09-07.json

node bin/arwp-search-maturity.mjs cohort \
  benchmarks/search-maturity/pilot-2026-09-07.json \
  --intent=ai-search-optimization

node bin/arwp-search-maturity.mjs diff \
  benchmarks/search-maturity/pilot-2026-09-07.json \
  target-search-maturity.json \
  --intent=ai-search-optimization

node bin/arwp-intent-ownership.mjs report \
  intent-ownership.json

node bin/arwp-intent-ownership.mjs probe \
  intent-ownership.json \
  --proof-output=surface-proof.json \
  --ledger-output=intent-ownership.observed.json

node bin/arwp-intent-ownership.mjs gate \
  intent-ownership.observed.json

Done when

• the reference cohort is timestamped and reviewable;
• independent and owner-controlled evidence are separated;
• unmeasured features remain unknown;
• query/grounding variation maps to reviewed canonical ownership or explicit decline before any new-page decision;
• repeated cohort patterns are explainable without a magic score;
• target gaps retain evidence class and uncertainty;
• accepted actions enter existing verification/measurement gates;
• current served owner readiness is based on an observed production ledger, not source assumptions;
• production probe, ownership gate and deployment parity remain separate evidence layers;
• ranking/citation causality is not inferred from correlation;
• negative outcomes remain available for future learning.

Functional emulation and Evidence Relay

When asked to reproduce maturity, find publication venues, connect DOI evidence or redesign growth analytics, read Evidence Relay. Reproduce an observable useful function with the target site's own artifacts; do not imitate history or independent reputation. The venue register contains candidates and eligibility requirements, not completed submissions. Read DOI records for the exact supported claim; identifiers do not confer endorsement.

For a reviewed artifact cohort, run node skills/arwp-search-maturity/scripts/evidence-relay.mjs <private-ledger.json> from the ARWP checkout. The script uses existing BraidGraph node references and evidence receipt references; it is not a second graph. It reports monitored yields, unknown coverage, immature assets, independent owner groups and citation support. Keep the synthetic example labeled; first-observed lags are not first-indexing times. Do not turn parallel stage observations into a visitor funnel or causal attribution.