contentgate

Pre-deploy guards for content sites. Python CLI and an MCP server, sharing one test suite.

Documentation and background: adsandcode.com/en/open-source/contentgate

These checks exist because each of them was written the day after the thing it checks for went live and cost something.

negative tests
  keywords
    [ok] expected block got block  primary keyword appears once, threshold is three
    [ok] expected block got block  spaced variant must not satisfy the unspaced keyword
    ...
  160 passed, 0 failed

checks
  [ ok ] keywords   choosing-a-cms (1200/1200 volume covered)
  [FAIL] keywords   headless-vs-monolith (300/750 volume covered)
      missing keyword 'headless cms' (volume 450): found 2 time(s), needs 3
  [ ok ] i18n       fr: 19 document(s)
  [ ok ] lastmod    19 page(s), 0 genuinely changed

[FAIL] 1 check(s) failed. Deploy blocked.

The one design rule

A guard that has never been shown to fail is decoration.

Every check ships negative tests: inputs it is required to reject. The suite runs before any verdict is reported, and a failing suite exits 2 without saying anything about your content. A checker that cannot prove it still catches a known-bad input does not get to tell you your site is fine.

This is not theoretical. Guards written for this project have included: one that read its keyword out of the site-wide footer and therefore passed every page ever; one that ran after the step that regenerated the file it was checking; and one whose exit code was discarded by the shell pipeline it lived in, so it printed "deploy blocked" while the deploy proceeded. All three looked fine. All three were found by asking them to fail on purpose.

The checks

Three details that look fussy and are not:

Whitespace is never normalised in keyword matching. web hosting and webhosting are different strings with different search volumes, and in languages that do not put spaces between words the gap between the two forms can be an order of magnitude. Letting one satisfy the other is how a guard passes a page that targets neither. This was found twice, on two pages, after publication.

Boilerplate is excluded from every body check. A call-to-action block present on every page will otherwise satisfy keywords and internal_links everywhere, which means both checks pass always.

Ties are not broken by dictionary order. Every keyword at the highest volume is primary. The alternative, taking the first maximum, makes the verdict depend on the order of keys in a JSON file, which is stable right up until someone reorders the table.

Two more that changed in 0.2.0:

A commercial link has to point at your own site. A relative link counts. An absolute link counts only when its host is in site_hosts or a subdomain of one, compared on label boundaries and read the way a browser reads it; without site_hosts, absolute links never count. A link to https://competitor.example/pricing/ ends in /pricing/ and sells someone else's product. The money path is matched against the path, not the query string, so /blog/?next=/pricing/ is not a pricing link.

A disclaimer has to negate the claim itself. A negation anywhere in the sentence used to be

... View full README on GitHub