Wired Sitemaps Back to 1993 and the Fields Only Pages Carry
Everything a visitor sees on Wired can be collected: headline, link, content id, publish time, dek, section path, tags, kicker, author and lead image on every story, and on Gear pages the score, WIRED/TIRED notes, prices and sellers as well. Print stories sit in the same stream as everything else and carry their issue label.
The sitemaps are the complete list. The index names only the latest 60 monthly files, yet a file exists for every month back to January 1993 at /sitemap-YYYY-MM.xml. Files group URLs by last update rather than first publication, so a guide first posted in 2019 sits in the month it was last rewritten, and a monthly file that changes between two pulls is a list of what moved. Further sitemaps cover tag pages, contributors, curated bundles and branded content, the Google News sitemap holds the last two days, and an HTML site map runs by year and month.
Category pages paginate back for years, twenty stories at a time, but the fields buyers pay for - scores, WIRED/TIRED notes, prices, sellers, picks - exist only on the pages. Brand teams track how WIRED rates them and their rivals, commerce teams see which sellers win the buy buttons in each market, and media analysts compare the three headlines of a story.