v2.24.0 — articles get a canonical, and pages get an answer-engine axis

The collection could make content and post it to social platforms. It could not
publish an article anywhere, and nothing in it knew that being quoted by an
answer engine is decided by different things than being ranked by a search
engine. Both are now covered, and both came with a correction to a premise.

Added — article syndication, canonical-first

Six article publishers alongside the seven social ones: devto, telegraph,
hashnode, tumblr, qiita, micropub. Post grew an article shape
(canonical_url, description, series) rather than a parallel system, so
preflight, receipts and the CLI all carry over.

The field that matters is --canonical. Syndicating without one is worse than
not syndicating: the same text on several domains makes search engines pick a
winner, and it is rarely the author's. Preflight warns when it is missing and
blocks a relative URL.

• micropub is a protocol, not a vendor — one adapter reaches Micro.blog,
  WordPress with the plugin, and anything else implementing the spec.
• devto is the anchor because it is the only platform in the set whose
  outbound links are dofollow. It is also the URL Medium's "Import a Story"
  pulls from, which is how a platform with no usable API still ends up pointing
  home: Medium sets canonical back to the source itself.
• cli.origin closes the chain at the other end. For a static site there is
  no publishing API, so it writes the markdown with frontmatter and prints the
  URL the post will have after the rebuild — which is what every later
  --canonical needs. Cyrillic titles transliterate; Jekyll's dated filenames
  are a pattern flag. It writes a file and stops: committing somebody's blog
  repository is not this layer's decision.
• Submission packets for the platforms that have no API at all — Medium,
  HackerNoon, Habr, VC.ru, Dzen — with the canonical instruction per platform
  and what each audience actually rewards.

Added — AEO, kept off the prose verdict

writer --aeo is a third axis next to slop density and the hard-ban gate.
Mixing it into either would repeat the mistake Report.verdict() already
documents. A text can read beautifully and still be unquotable.

The rules encode how engines actually work: they do not read pages, they chunk
them into passages and cite the strongest one. So the checks are structural —
a direct answer inside the first 40-75 words, question-form headings, paragraphs
that survive chunking, a table on comparison pages. Offline, no model.

schema-maker (43rd skill) generates the JSON-LD. Question-form headings
become FAQPage pairs automatically, so the structure the linter asks for is
not authored twice. Google retired the FAQ rich result on 2026-05-07; the markup
outlived it and changed job — engines parse FAQPage first when choosing whose
answer to quote. The generator refuses to emit a statement inside a Question
node, or a headline past the documented 110-character limit.

essay-write gained the answer-first opening as a conditional mode, for web
publication only — a book chapter's first paragraph works on voice, and forcing
search discipline there would fight the skill's own guidance. viral-text says
plainly that a social post is not an AEO surface.

Added — distribution map

cli.distribute writes submission packets for directories and registries, with
project facts read from the repo so a packet cannot describe a stale version.
docs/distribution.md records where the project is listed, where it should be,
and what each listing is worth.

Fixed — npm was publishing a two-year-old version, and shipping bytecode

The registry showed 1.9.0 while the repo was on 2.23.0, because nothing tied
npm publish to cutting a release. make release now calls make publish-npm,
after the tag so a failed login leaves the tag intact and the step re-runnable.

The tarball was also shipping __pycache__/*.pyc: .npmignore never applied,
because package.json sets a files allow-list and that takes precedence.
Negation patterns fixed it — 656 files down to 552.

Fixed — new-skill.sh had been scaffolding into the wrong directory

Skills moved under skills/ in v2.22.0 and the scaffolder kept writing to the
repo root, so any new skill landed where validate.sh does not look. Found by
using it.

Honest about what does not work

• Substack has no official API. A third-party service sells one for $9/month
  that authenticates with your browser session cookie — handing a live session
  to someone else's server, against Substack's terms. Not wired, not recommended.
• llms.txt is generated, with the caveat in the docs: a community convention
  with no standards body, no vendor committed to reading it in production, and
  no place in any documented citation pipeline. Cheap and harmless, not a lever.
• Backlinks from these platforms are mostly nofollow. The mechanism that
  works is canonical consolidation, not link equity. And ТИЦ, the metric that
  prompted the question, was retired in 2018.