<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- Absolute URLs are mandatory here: the sitemap protocol does not permit
     relative <loc> values, so this file cannot be host-agnostic. It shipped
     to production carrying the scaffold's REPLACE-WITH-YOUR-DOMAIN
     placeholder, which made it invalid and silently useless.

     www, not the apex — that is what merlinjourney.com resolves to, and a
     sitemap naming the non-canonical variant invites duplicate-content
     splitting.

     Clean URLs, no .html — the deployment sets cleanUrls:true (vercel.json),
     so /ukrainian-queen.html 308-redirects to /ukrainian-queen. Listing the
     redirecting form spends crawl budget on a hop and makes the sitemap
     disagree with every internal link on the site.

     The three cover*.html pages are deliberately absent: they are print/OG
     artwork rather than pages, and robots.txt disallows them. -->
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/</loc>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/method</loc>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/ukrainian-queen</loc>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/academy</loc>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/for-businesses</loc>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/about</loc>
    <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  <!-- Lowest priority and yearly, not because the page matters least but
       because it changes least and is the one a crawler can most safely
       revisit rarely. Priority is a relative hint within this file only —
       it says nothing to Google about this site versus any other. -->
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.merlinjourney.com/contact</loc>
    <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.6</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>
