{
    "id": 1079519,
    "title": "Route hygiene",
    "slug": "route-hygiene",
    "type": "page",
    "url": "https://teas.co.uk/wiki/route-hygiene/",
    "modified": "2026-11-15T01:49:58+00:00",
    "excerpt": "Route hygiene is the care taken to keep every path between a piece of information and its source accurate and working: product links, citations, old addresses that have moved, and the actions a link offers.",
    "content_text": "In capsule: Route hygiene is the care taken to keep every path between a piece of information and its source accurate and working: product links, citations, old addresses that have moved, and the actions a link offers. Lee Samuel Tucker uses the phrase for the upkeep that makes a business safe for people and AI assistants to follow.\nA recommendation is only as good as the link behind it. If an assistant recommends the right tea and the link opens the wrong pack size, the customer has still been let down.\nA tea example\nYorkshire Tea comes in several pack sizes. A link that promises the 80 bag box of Yorkshire Tea Original must open that box, with its own price and price per cup, not a page listing every size or a page that no longer exists. When a product leaves the range, its old address should lead to the closest thing the shop still sells, and teas that are getting hard to find have a shelf of their own rather than a dead end.\nHow it works\n\nOne clear destination for each thing, marked as the main version where copies exist (Google on canonical addresses).\nOld links kept alive with permanent redirects when pages move or merge (Google on redirects). The web's founding advice is that cool URIs don't change.\nThe right status for the right answer, so a missing page says it is missing (how status codes affect Google's crawlers).\nCitations that land where they promise. teas.co.uk publishes exact quotable anchors across pages and lists them in its citation anchor sitemap, so an assistant can link to the precise sentence it quotes.\nClear actions. Reading a product, adding it to a basket and paying are different steps, and a link should make clear which one it offers. On teas.co.uk an assistant can fill a basket, but the customer checks it and pays on the site.\n\nWhat it is not\nIt is not a one off clean up. Products, prices and pages change every week, so route hygiene is continuing work. Nor is it a claim that Lee invented the phrase; it is the name the teas.co.uk project uses for this upkeep.\nWhat others have found\nOutside research and reporting that bears on this, with links to the original sources.\n\nGoogle's introduction to robots.txt explains how a site tells crawlers which parts they may visit.\nllms.txt is a proposed standard for a file that tells language models what a site contains and where to find it.\nDuane Forrester shows in Search Engine Journal how one well documented figure ends up quoted in different ways (Search Engine Journal): a reminder to link every number to its source.\n\nQuick reference\n\nDetail\nInformation\n\nTerm\nRoute hygiene\n\nMeaning\nKeeping links, citations, redirects and actions accurate and working\n\nUsed by\nLee Samuel Tucker and the teas.co.uk project\n\nIn use since\n2026\n\nOpposite or contrast\nDead links, wrong pack pages, citations that point nowhere\n\nRelated\nThe complete payload, truth entity, claim boundaries\n\nRelated terms\n\nThe complete payload\nTruth entity\nBuilt versus planned\nLee Samuel Tucker's builder vocabulary\n\nThe bottom line on route hygiene\nEvery link is a promise. Route hygiene is keeping that promise as the shop changes, so people and assistants always land on the thing they were told about.\nMore from the tea wiki\n\nPremium Intent\nTruth entity\nThe complete payload\nLee Samuel Tucker's builder vocabulary\nLee Samuel Tucker\nThe whole Tea Wiki, A to Z",
    "contentSignals": "ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes",
    "links": {
        "apiCatalog": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/api-catalog",
        "llmsTxt": "https://teas.co.uk/llms.txt",
        "mcp": "https://teas.co.uk/mcp",
        "mcpSetupGuides": "https://teas.co.uk/ai/",
        "mcpCard": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json",
        "primaryAgenticRouteAuthority": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/teas-primary-agentic-route-authority.json"
    }
}