XML sitemap checker
A sitemap is the list of URLs you want crawled. Without one, a new page waits to be discovered. An HTML homepage at /sitemap.xml is worse than nothing: it looks like a file and is not.
What we measure
We fetch /sitemap.xml in parallel with robots.txt. If robots.txt names a different http(s) sitemap, that URL wins — unless it fails the public-URL guard, in which case we do not follow it.
urlset vs sitemapindex, the loc count (capped scan), and a short sample. We do not recurse an index and we do not download gzipped sitemaps in this pass.
What belongs in it
Canonical, indexable URLs that respond 200. Not noindex, not redirects, not 404s. If the file needed shards, it became a catalog — keep the index small and honest.
See the full audit in your workspace