could you check my guide against your steps?
I have tried not to use but the offered names for projects and clients but there is no difference, always branding required...
On thing that I have not tried yet is not to provide scopes. I read in some thread that rclone is not needing the scopes so that could be triggering the branding. But rclone.org guide says "You will also have to add some scopes, including..."
I have a pcloud account that offers a personal website and I had AI create the necessary documents and I created HTML pages and pointed Google at those pages which enabled me to say publish the project only it failed validation because I don't own the domain.
You should try doing the same with GitHub pages. Give it a valid URL but don't validate it.
I will take a look at your doc.
I'm also going to try and set up my own GitHub pages and see if I can do what I did with my cloud service web server.
The workaround trick with github works good, but I am not quite sure it will remain acceptable for Google mid-term. The point is finding out how you are able to push to publish as you said without branding...
I am doing the branding. I have a personal web server and I created terms of service and policy pages and pointed Google at that. Once I had all the entries filled in with something and I added the domain at the bottom of the page and all of the sudden the greyed out publish button wasn't grayed out anymore.
My personal web server is provided by my cloud Server provider pcloud.
Google offers users a totally free website. Sites.google.com i think.
Like I said I didn't actually get validation to work but it's in a published mode. It's not in test anymore.
Also, I just remembered that my router at home has a dynamic domain name provided by the manufacturer of the router so I have an Internet routable domain name. I forward the data back and forth between my PC and the router. It's still not going to validate because the domain name is not mine.
My understanding as of right now is that everybody might need to register a domain which would suck. If someone does buy a domain for example all they need to do is buy the domain and set up a free website at Google and you can transfer the domain name to Google.
As far as GitHub goes I suspect that it won't continue to work indefinitely.
If you're on Windows there is a free app called tiny web server.