Proportionate optimisation, control 5 of 8
O-05 Protect winning assets and stop optimisation churn
P0Hard gateNeeds your evidence
Do not repeatedly change valuable assets while earlier effects are unobserved. Protect demonstrated user and commercial value, and do not misclassify a page as worthless merely because telemetry is unavailable.
- Priority
- Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
- Hard gate
- Yes. A FAIL stops publication, whatever the score.
- Change class
- READ_ONLY: Inspect authorised evidence.
- Quality bucket
- Not scored: hard gate only
Evidence to review
- Trusted impact inventory, protected-asset register, change history, approvals and active-experiment ledger.
How to implement
- Record protected URLs, reasons and valuable sections, links, facts and conversion functions.
- Require explicit candidate-bound approval for any protected-URL intervention, even if the code change is small.
- Record overlapping experiments and prevent a new uncoordinated optimisation of the same asset.
- Declare an observation/review trigger before rollout; no universal Google-safe cooldown is implied.
- Route verified urgent factual/security corrections separately so an experiment freeze does not preserve harm.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Needs your evidence. No automated check covers this control, so it stays UNKNOWN until evidence is supplied.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.