BROKE / RECOVERED
The deploy was green. The site was stale.
The Pages workflow could succeed without Hugo producing a home page, and then publish an old local build.
- BROKE
- GitHub Pages workflow green, live site unchanged
- CAUSE
- Hugo exits 0 even when it renders no index.html; the job never asserted its output
- FIX
- A smoke check in CI: index.html, canonical, sitemap, RSS and CNAME must exist
- PROOF
- The same check runs on every pull request, before merge
A green check proves the job finished. It does not prove the artifact is right. The fix was not in Hugo — it was making the pipeline look at the thing it was about to ship.