v0.31.0

Added

• IndexNow now submits product brand archive URLs (#569).
  • Brand (product_brand) archive pages were the one taxonomy IndexNow skipped: "Submit entire catalog now" gathered products and categories but not brands, and editing a brand never pinged search engines.
  • Adds brand enumeration to the full-catalog submission and per-term change detection for created/edited/delete on product_brand, mirroring the existing category handling.
  • Permalinks resolve through get_term_link(), so the correct registered base (/brand/ or /product-brand/) is used automatically. Stores without the brand taxonomy are unaffected.

Changed

• robots.txt per-bot rules are now a deny-list (#571).
  • The named-crawler group listed Allow: lines for permitted paths; a named group ignores User-agent: * (RFC 9309), so an allow-list risked silently blocking any path not explicitly listed by omission.
  • It now blocks only cart/checkout/account and lets everything else be crawled by default (including product/category archives and sitemap paths). Two defensive Allow: lines for the /wp-json/ commerce endpoints are kept as forward-looking insurance against a future broad /wp-json/ block.
  • No behavior change for standards-compliant crawlers (an unlisted path was already crawlable); the win is robustness for naive parsers and future-proofing. WordPress core's admin-ajax.php exception and the opted-out-bot block are untouched.