Is your sitemap doing its job?
We look for it the way a crawler does — robots.txt first, then the conventional path — read it, and tell you what we found: malformed URLs, off-domain ones, http entries, missing dates, and whether a sample of them actually resolves.
Found the way a crawler finds it
The robots.txt declaration first, then the conventional path. A sitemap a crawler can't find does nothing.
Checks the URLs resolve
We sample a few and actually request them. A sitemap full of 404s burns your site's crawl budget.
The protocol limits
50,000 URLs and 50 MB per file. Past that, the engine ignores the rest.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sitemap for?
It's the list of pages you want a search engine to know about. It doesn't guarantee indexing, but it saves the engine from discovering them by crawling — which matters most on large sites or ones with little authority.
Do you check all my URLs?
No. We read up to 2,000 entries and actually request a small sample to see whether they resolve. It's a health check, not an exhaustive audit: requesting 50,000 URLs from your server would be a problem for you, not a help.
Is it bad to have dead URLs in the sitemap?
Yes, and it's one of the most common errors. You're asking the engine to spend its crawl budget on pages that don't exist instead of the ones that do. If the sample comes back with 404s, look at how the file is generated.
What if you can't find my sitemap?
It may live at an unusual path. Declare it in your robots.txt with a "Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/your-path.xml" line: that's the standard way any engine finds it without guessing.
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