Execution safety, control 9 of 9
S-09 Prepare rollback, incident handling and a kill switch
P0Hard gateNeeds your evidence
Every consequential workflow needs a practical way to stop further changes and recover from a bad deployment. A written rollback idea is not proof of recoverability.
- Priority
- Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
- Hard gate
- Yes. A FAIL stops publication, whatever the score.
- Change class
- READ_ONLY: Inspect authorised evidence.
- Quality bucket
- Not scored: hard gate only
Evidence to review
- Rollback artifact, rehearsal or justified recovery test, kill-switch test and incident runbook.
How to implement
- Capture a usable baseline and rehearse restoration where feasible.
- Define technical abort signals, responsible owner and escalation route.
- Halt new writes on security, truth or access incidents.
- After rollback, verify live state and check that queues cannot reapply the bad change.
- Separate urgent verified harm from uncertain search fluctuations. Recovery must not restore a known security defect, expired offer or false business fact.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Needs your evidence. No automated check covers this control, so it stays UNKNOWN until evidence is supplied.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.