Silent 200 Responses Can Hide Empty Pages in Automated Policy Checks

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A developer running automated legal-document checks discovered their script was silently passing client-rendered pages that returned HTTP 200 but contained almost no actual text. Pages like peerlist.io/terms and daily.dev/terms delivered under 100 characters of content — essentially empty JavaScript shells — while a real legal document typically contains 20,000 or more characters. Because the script used a negative assertion, treating 'no clause found' as a pass, an empty document produced the same result as a genuinely clean one. The Substack publisher agreement, which contained a clause the developer needed to flag, was nearly missed entirely due to this flaw. The fix involves validating input before grepping: checking minimum text length, confirming legal-document markers are present, and returning an 'UNRESOLVED' verdict rather than silently defaulting to clean.

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