Rule: in the first weeks after launch, validate RENDERED HTML via Search Console URL Inspection — confirm critical content, links, canonical, and structured data survive rendering

Rule: In the first weeks after launch, use Search Console URL Inspection (Live Test) to view the rendered HTML Google actually sees. Confirm:

• Critical content (headings, body copy, key facts) is present in the rendered HTML.
• Internal links are present as <a href> elements.
• The canonical tag is correct.
• Structured data (if any) is present and valid.
• The mobile rendered HTML matches the desktop rendered HTML for the above.

Why: Lab tools, browser DevTools, and "view source" can show different HTML than Googlebot rendering produces — caching, JS execution order, server-side detection of bots can all diverge. URL Inspection is the closest thing to Google's ground truth (Google two-stage processing — crawl raw HTML first; all 200-status pages queued for rendering ("a headless Chromium renders the page and executes the JavaScript") with delays from seconds to hours per Vercel/MERJ).

How to apply: Inspect at least 5 representative pages per launch (homepage, top service page, top product/article, deep page, mobile-rendered version). If the rendered HTML is missing content visible in the browser, the rendering pipeline is broken — fix before promoting.