My sitemap said Success. Google said it had never heard of my pages.
Three days of waiting for indexing that was never going to happen. One missing www was the reason.
Field Note #005 was about making the site visible to search engines. This is the sequel nobody asked for.
The sitemap was submitted. Status: Success. Nine URLs discovered. No errors anywhere. I checked Search Console, saw green, and assumed indexing was in progress.
Three days later, nothing. Every Field Note still unknown to Google.
What I actually looked at
The sitemap file itself. https://www.fieldnotes-ai.com/sitemap.xml
Every URL in it started with https://fieldnotes-ai.com — no www.
Google had indexed https://www.fieldnotes-ai.com as the canonical domain. The non-www version redirects to www. So Google saw the sitemap URLs as a completely separate set of pages from the ones it knew about.
The sitemap was valid. The sitemap was submitted. The sitemap was pointing at the wrong domain the entire time.
"No referring sitemaps detected" was the clue. It appeared on every Field Note URL I inspected. I missed it the first time because everything else looked fine.
The fix
One line in app/sitemap.ts:
'https://fieldnotes-ai.com' → 'https://www.fieldnotes-ai.com'
Deploy. Resubmit sitemap. Done.
What it cost
$0.43. 488,042 tokens. One prompt, one edit, one deploy.
The three days of waiting cost nothing except the three days.
The thing worth remembering
Search Console showing Success does not mean indexing is working. It means the sitemap file is valid XML that Google can read. Those are not the same thing.
Check the actual URLs in your sitemap. Check that they match the canonical domain Google has indexed. Check them in a browser, not just in the dashboard.
The dashboard will tell you everything is fine right up until it isn't.