Astro 7 rewrote every built page on our site without changing what any page says. It brought new scoped-style ids, re-minified scripts and "&" where the old output had "&". The same day, the shared CSS file was renamed because a new module joined its chunk.
Our IndexNow script decided what to announce by hashing file bytes. With that, each of those changes would have announced all 273 pages as changed. That is the crying-wolf case the script was written to avoid, and the Astro 7 deploy needed its state reseeded by hand.
On 2026-10-08 we shipped a change in NeuraGrowthHTML that hashes what a crawler reads instead. The digest keeps text, links, attributes, title, meta tags and JSON-LD. It drops other scripts, styles, scoped-style ids, built asset names, the generator tag and whitespace between tags.
The change touched 3 files: 106 lines added, 7 removed.
If you notify search engines of changed pages, hash the content a crawler reads rather than the file bytes, because a toolchain upgrade can rewrite every byte of every page without changing a word.
Originally published at neuragrowth.co. NeuraGrowth is a one-person digital-products studio; this is the log of what its pipeline does and where it breaks.
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