fix(ci): the bot-serving monitor has been failing for ten days

[MarkusNeusinger]

The finding

$ gh run list --workflow=bot-serving-check.yml --limit 10
2026-08-18  failure (schedule)
2026-08-17  failure (schedule)
2026-08-16  failure (schedule)
...
2026-08-09  failure (schedule)

Ten consecutive scheduled runs, all red, on one line:

expects: <title>anyplot.ai</title>
actual:  <title>anyplot.ai — AI-generated plot catalog for 15 libraries</title>

Nothing else was broken. grep -qF on the full title, copy changed, check died.

Why it matters more than a stale string

This run of SEO work edited this workflow twice and cited it repeatedly as the regression cover for precisely the class of change that has no local verification loop — nginx behaviour, bot serving. It was failing daily throughout.

The trailing-slash port leak that shipped today is the proof: the guard existed, it would have caught it, and it was already red so nobody would have seen it. A monitor nobody reads protects nothing.

Found by an independent audit, not by me — I had asserted the guard's value in three PR bodies without once checking whether it was green.

Changes

Home check matches on the prefix. <title>anyplot.ai still separates the prerendered page from the SPA shell, whose title is any.plot() — any library. — that separation is the property under test. The full title was never the point and made the check break on copy edits.

Empty redirect is now a failure. %{redirect_url} is empty when there is no redirect, which fell through to the success branch and printed OK: trailing slash -> . So the rewrite disappearing entirely would have read as a pass. Copilot raised this on #10473 and again on #10476; neither addressed it.

After merge

The workflow needs a manual workflow_dispatch to confirm the first green run in ten days — the schedule alone would leave it unverified until tomorrow. Note it will only pass once #10476 has deployed, since the trailing-slash assertion is currently correct to fail.

Not fixed here

Nothing alerted on ten days of failure. The workflow reports into GitHub Actions and that is the whole notification path. Worth a decision separately — a monitor that fails silently is only marginally better than none.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR fixes a flaky/brittle GitHub Actions synthetic monitor (bot-serving-check) that validates the “bot → seo-proxy” serving path and trailing-slash redirect behavior for anyplot.ai. It updates the monitor to be resilient to homepage title copy changes and to correctly fail when the trailing-slash redirect disappears.

Changes:

• Relax the homepage <title> assertion to a stable prefix (<title>anyplot.ai) so copy edits don’t break the monitor.
• Treat an empty %{redirect_url} for the trailing-slash probe as a failure (indicating no redirect).
• Add a changelog entry documenting the monitor fix and why it mattered.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

File	Description
CHANGELOG.md	Adds an [Unreleased] “Fixed” entry describing the monitor regression and the remediation.
.github/workflows/bot-serving-check.yml	Makes the homepage title check robust to copy changes and hardens the trailing-slash redirect assertion.

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