<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
  sitemap.xml — averon-systems.com

  Seven URLs as of 2026-08-22: the homepage plus six objection-coverage pages.

  WHY the site grew past one page: 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report
  measures the point of first contact at 61% of the way through the buying
  journey, with 95% of wins already on the buyer's day-one shortlist. The site
  therefore has to survive weeks of anonymous evaluation with no salesperson
  present, and a single page can only answer the objections that fit above the
  FAQ. These pages are objection COVERAGE, not an SEO volume play — which is why
  there are six hand-written ones and not a hundred generated ones.

  The two standing rules, unchanged:

  1. NEVER list a #fragment as a separate <url>. Fragments are not crawlable
     URLs; Google discards them and an inflated sitemap of anchors is a known
     way to look spammy for zero gain. Section anchors are discovered from the
     nav links in index.html, which is what they are for.

  2. <lastmod> must be a real date on which the page CONTENT changed. Scripting
     it to today's date on every deploy is the most common sitemap mistake —
     Google learns the signal is noise and stops weighting it. Update it by
     hand, in the same commit that changes the copy.

  /privacy is deliberately ABSENT: it carries noindex,follow, and listing a
  noindexed URL in a sitemap sends Search Console two contradictory signals.
  /terms is absent for the same reason — it is noindex,follow.

  /accessibility IS LISTED, and the asymmetry with /terms is deliberate. It is the one
  legal-adjacent page that should be findable: it carries the barrier-reporting route,
  and a user with a disability — or a plaintiff's firm — finding it in search BEFORE a
  complaint is the entire reason it exists. Florida was the #2 web-accessibility filing
  jurisdiction in 2025 (961 federal filings, nearly double its 2024 total of 470 —
  Seyfarth Shaw), so discoverability here is risk reduction, not an SEO play.

  Priorities are relative, not absolute. The homepage carries the conversion
  goal; pricing and the two comparison pages are where an anonymous evaluator
  actually decides; about and security are supporting reassurance.

  lastmod 2026-08-22: six secondary pages added.
-->
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://averon-systems.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-16</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://averon-systems.com/pricing</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-16</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://averon-systems.com/security</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-24</lastmod>
    <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.6</priority>
  </url>
  <!-- Added 2026-09-16 with the page. Priority 0.5, the lowest on the site: it must be
       findable (see the note above) but it is not a page that should outrank an offer
       surface for a commercial query. -->
  <url>
    <loc>https://averon-systems.com/accessibility</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-16</lastmod>
    <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
  <!-- /about REMOVED 2026-08-26: the page was deleted at Eric's direction because he
       does not want his personal information published. Delisted in the same commit
       that deleted the file. A sitemap that advertises a URL returning 404 is the
       fastest way to teach Search Console the feed is unreliable. -->
  <!-- Added 2026-08-23: #system and #department moved off the homepage into real
       URLs at Eric's direction. Priority 0.9 for /department-builds because it
       carries the highest-value offer on the site ($18-48K builds) and is now the
       only place the bands, the stacking rule and the existing-client credit are
       stated in full. /meet-the-team is 0.9 as well: it answers "what do you actually
       do", which is the question the homepage exists to answer.

       AUDIT 2026-08-26: /the-system was DELETED, not merely delisted. It had already
       been merged into /meet-the-team on 2026-08-24 and all that remained was a
       734-byte meta-refresh stub carrying noindex + a canonical pointing away from
       itself. Nothing on the site linked to it and it was never listed here, so it
       had no traffic to preserve; an unknown URL now returns a real 404 (the
       static-site module maps CloudFront 404->404, not a soft 200). If it ever turns
       out to hold inbound links, the fix is a 301 in the module's viewer-request
       function, NOT a meta refresh, which is a soft redirect Google treats as a
       hint. The sentence above originally read "/the-system is 0.9 as well"; it has
       been corrected to name the page that URL became. -->
  <url>
    <loc>https://averon-systems.com/meet-the-team</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-16</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://averon-systems.com/department-builds</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-16</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>
