Uptime checkers and link validators probe with HEAD, so register
HEAD on all public routes and treat HEAD as a crawler so probes
do not inflate view counts or write search logs.
The custom-domain host lookup hit the DB before any rate limit.
Both the not-found gate and the host-home redirect now pay the
"public" limit first, and the middleware skips double-charging.
DB errors on help center pages rendered the plain unthemed error
page. Reuse the themed notfound template for them: it now takes
code, title, and text, so 404 and 500 both render inside the theme.
Also cap the sitemap at the URL limit, skip re-embedding unchanged
content in the AI embed reconciler, and autofocus the login email.
Abhinav Raut
1ac0c77b88