feat(sources): expand curated news coverage — 123 countries have no curated publisher

**Severity: P1.** The enrichment from #7615 works. It reached roughly half the corpus, and the half it missed is unchanged.

## Coverage, measured across 25 sampled country pages

**13 of 25 have a "Recent developments" section. 11 of 25 have a full country brief.**

| Page | R5 words | R6 words | Δ | Enriched? |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---|
| iran | 678 | **1,377** | +103% | Yes |
| bhutan | 657 | **1,057** | +61% | Yes |
| brazil | 690 | 824 | +19% | **No** |
| andorra | 746 | 858 | +15% | **No** |
| palau | 779 | 862 | +11% | **No** |

Enriched pages run **1,179–1,599** words (ukraine 1,599, nigeria 1,390, iran 1,377, india 1,352, sudan 1,330, germany 1,279, norway 1,245, nauru 1,235, canada 1,188, vietnam 1,179). Unenriched run **728–886**.

Skipped in the sample: Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, Comoros, Tuvalu, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra, Palau.

## The enrichment is genuinely analytical, which is why the gap matters

This is not padding. On Iran, **26% of sentences now carry a dated, sourced, causal country-specific claim**, against **2% on Brazil**, which received nothing. Round 5's finding was that country prose was 100% generated recitation with zero analytical sentences; the enriched half fixed that properly.

Template share across the sample is **33.2% mean** (range 9.9%–57.4%), measured with country names and all digits masked, so that is an upper bound.

External evidence that it works: `/countries/` took **#1 for "current country instability rankings"** this round, with the AI answer quoting World Monitor verbatim. The enrichment and the dated-snapshot pattern are why.

> **Do not trim depth in response to the Iran ranking loss.** "Iran country risk score" went WIN → LOSS this round, but the cause was investigated and is **vocabulary mismatch, not burial**: the extractable answer appears four times including `` and meta description. The query wants a durable sovereign rating; we answer with an index that moves 4 points a day. Enrichment is safe — see the round-6 report.

## Fix

1. **Run the enrichment across the remaining ~184 country pages.** The pipeline exists and is proven; this is coverage, not new capability.
2. **Fix the rendering defects first** — #7738, literal `**` markdown and ISO codes leaking into headings, affects 7 of 11 sampled briefs. Do not multiply that across 184 more pages.
3. **Watch grounding-source thinness.** Bhutan and Nauru receive full 24/48/72h forecast briefs from a **single** grounding source. A confident multi-horizon forecast off one source is a trust liability on a YMYL page; either surface the source count or suppress the brief below a threshold.
4. **Guard:** assert every indexed country page contains at least one dated, sourced, country-specific sentence, so the unenriched tail cannot silently persist.

## Related

#7615 (the enrichment), #7738 (its rendering defects)

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_From the 2026-09-05 GEO audit, round 6._

Start by reading #7615 for the existing enrichment pipeline and #7738 for the rendering defects. Run the country-page enrichment and inspect the remaining country pages, especially markdown and ISO-code headings and thin grounding sources. Done means the remaining pages are covered, rendering defects are fixed, and an index guard requires a dated, sourced, country-specific sentence.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.