Is your sitemap.xml present and valid?
sitemap.xml is present and valid. Crawlers discover pages by following links and by reading the sitemap.
What the check looks at
The check looks for the sitemap where crawlers look — /sitemap.xml and the Sitemap: line in robots.txt — fetches it, and checks that it parses as a sitemap or a sitemap index with absolute URLs.
Why it matters
Crawlers discover pages by following links and by reading the sitemap. Without a valid one, new or deep pages are found late or never; with one, every page you want found is listed in one machine-readable place, with the date it last changed.
How to see it on your own site
Open /sitemap.xml. It should be XML with
How to fix it
- Generate it from the site, never by hand: every CMS and framework has a sitemap plugin or route.
- Reference it in robots.txt:
Sitemap: https://yourdomain/sitemap.xml. - Keep
honest — a sitemap where every page changed today is ignored.
What the agent does: the agent serves a sitemap built from the pages the site publishes — one click, and it stays current.
Related checks
Part of the 23 checks · group: Crawler access — robots.txt, CDN/bot filter, login walls, noindex, HTTP status, sitemap, canonical.
Questions people ask
My site has 20 pages — do I need a sitemap?
Yes, and it is cheap: 20 pages is 20 lines. The sitemap is also how engines learn a page changed.
Does the sitemap help AI engines specifically?
The retrieval engines crawl the same way search engines do, and AI search (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode) draws on search indexes that read sitemaps.
Start with the free check. Then tell the agent what you need.
The free check runs the 23 checks on your public pages. Nothing is installed, nothing changes until you press it.
Free check from outside in minutes · the report by email · nothing installed yet