Fix: Unknown paths return HTTP 404 or 410
Web-audit fix skill for the
agent-friendly-404check (Discoverability, SHOULD).
Goal
Return a real HTTP 404 or 410 for unknown paths instead of a 200 SPA shell.
Fix
Configure the origin so a nonsense path under the site returns HTTP 404 or 410, not 200 with the application shell. A soft-404 hides recovery from agents: they treat the page as content and never look for a sitemap or llms.txt. Verify with curl -sS -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://example.com/this-path-does-not-exist — it MUST print 404 (or 410).
Resources
Copy-paste prompt
Paste this into your coding agent. Your audit adds what it observed for this check:
Verify
Re-run the audit at https://anc.dev/audit or call the audit_website MCP tool; the agent-friendly-404 check should report pass.