Diagnose an empty category sitemap without changing eligibility

Category sitemaps whose entries depend on a current readiness or qualifying-content rule. Use when the XML is empty and the cause needs a read-only diagnosis.

1. Fetch the public category sitemap and retain the HTTP status and content type. Parse the response as XML and count category URL entries; HTTP 200 alone is insufficient.
2. Read the current authoritative category-readiness input through an approved read-only path. Record the category inventory count and the qualifying-skill counts; do not assume that every stored category is eligible for search.
3. Apply the existing category eligibility rule to those current inputs and compare the eligible URL set with the XML entries. If all categories currently have zero qualifying skills, a successful empty URL set can be correct.
4. Keep dependency failure distinct: an unavailable readiness input must remain an unavailable response, not a successful empty sitemap. Inspect the error boundary and retained tests without inducing a production failure.
5. Preserve the observed status, valid XML, counts and remaining uncertainty. Do not loosen eligibility, invent category content, change canonical URL policy or claim search-engine indexing as part of this diagnosis.

The observed public category sitemap returned HTTP 200 and valid empty XML. The inspected readiness input contained 28 categories with zero qualifying skills. The source error boundary separately returns an unavailable response when the dependency fails. These observations support the current empty eligible set; no deployed failure was induced and no search-engine effect was measured.