The redirect chain you create by fixing something else

Folding two pages into one meant adding /company -> /experiment. An old rule already pointed /about-us -> /company. So a single new redirect quietly turned an existing one into a two-hop chain: /about-us -> /company -> /experiment.

Nothing about that is visible. Both hops work, the reader arrives, and the only cost is a bit of signal lost at each hop and a finding in whatever audit runs next.

It was caught because a gate asserts that no rule points at a path which is itself redirected. The generator now resolves every rule in the file transitively rather than only the ones it created, bounded at ten hops so a cycle throws instead of hanging. 55 chains flattened.

The general shape: a redirect is not a property of one rule, it is a property of the whole map, and a change that is locally correct can still make the map worse.