Compared the fresh alert signals against the actual local artifacts and prior repair lanes. The May 15 Ahrefs alert showed Site Audit health dropping 99 to 36, with URLs with errors jumping 9 to 541 between the 2026-05-09 and 2026-05-15 crawls. The useful local evidence came from the May 8 export folder, the May 10 external-link and traffic-3XX passes, and the May 17 fresh Screaming Frog recrawl in Codex artifacts.
The shortest real fix list is not a generic 541-item audit. The high-inlink spike drivers have already been fixed in the May 17 live passes: the sitewide LinkedIn profile link, stale ?page_id=62, resources/resources/blog/, tesla-fsd-investigation-2026/, and truck-accident-lawyers/ references. Current live Rank Math sitemap QA passed: sitemap index 200, four child sitemaps fetched, 585 URLs checked, and zero broken, redirected, or noindex URLs in the sitemap. That clears the Semrush-style sitemap mismatch at the live sitemap layer.
Created the local handoff/report: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Projects/Screaming Frog 5.8.26/broken-link-spike-shortlist-2026-05-19.md.
Updated the Codex QA queue: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Codex/_qa-queue/2026-05-19.md.
Exact staged manifest: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Codex/screaming-frog/2026-05-17/remaining-404-live-fixes/remaining-404-fix-manifest-20260518T114937Z.csv.
Backups and before/after HTML: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Codex/screaming-frog/2026-05-17/remaining-404-live-fixes/remaining-404-backups-20260518T114937Z/.
Recommended publish shape: publish 27 pages/posts covering 58 broken external URL instances. Hold the ATV page row as-is because one proposed CPSC replacement, https://www.cpsc.gov/FAQ/All-Terrain-Vehicles-ATVs, returned 403 from browser-like checks. The CPSC PDF replacement in the same row returns 200, but the row should be revised before publishing.
Fresh comparison showed external bad-ish rows roughly flat from May 8 to May 17, 99 to 102, with 41 new/regressed and 38 cleared. The new/regressed set is mostly external citation URLs, not a new internal sitewide break.
Confirmed May 17 live-fix manifests: 3 high-confidence external rows applied with 8 changed instances, and 5 internal rows applied with 7 changed instances. Checked replacement targets in the dry-run queue: 24 returned 200, 1 CPSC replacement returned 403, and 2 replace_fragment entries are content fragments rather than plain URL swaps.
No new live writes were made in this session.
The task reached a clean staging point: the real spike drivers were separated from crawler noise, the sitemap mismatch was live-verified as clear, and the remaining publish queue is exact with proof and one known hold item.
Use the staged manifest as the source of truth, but do not apply the ATV CPSC FAQ replacement as-is. Either revise that one replacement or exclude that page row, then publish the remaining 27 page/post queue through the WordPress-safe path with backups, Cloudways cache purge, cache-busted public HTML QA, exact old-URL string scans, replacement-target status checks, and a final Rank Math sitemap check.
The next agent can rely on the local report for ranked context instead of reopening the broad audit.