sitemap.xml is missing or not served

Audit check sitemap · worth 5 of 100 points · all checks

What the audit saw

GET /sitemap.xml did not return 200.

Why it costs you

The sitemap is the list of URLs you want indexed, with optional lastmod dates. It is the fastest way to get new pages discovered, and the only way to tell a crawler which of your URLs matter when the site is large.

How to find it on your site

  1. Check 
    curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' https://your-site.com/sitemap.xml
  2. Generate it from the pages that actually exist 
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url><loc>https://your-site.com/</loc><lastmod>2026-01-01</lastmod></url>
</urlset>
  3. Announce it to IndexNow after each deploy 
    curl -X POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"host":"your-site.com","key":"KEY",
       "keyLocation":"https://your-site.com/KEY.txt",
       "urlList":["https://your-site.com/new-page/"]}'

How to know it is fixed

HTTP 200, valid XML, and every <loc> is a URL that returns 200.

The part people get wrong

Sitemaps listing 404s or redirects are a common own-goal: the crawler spends its budget on dead URLs and trusts the file less. Generate the file from the same list that builds the pages.

Check it against your own site

Open an issue with your URL and a bot runs this check plus 14 others, posts the failures with the measured values, and publishes a report page: free audit. If you want the fixes applied and re-verified instead: fixed-price tiers.

Other checks

The site does not answer on the URL you gave · The page is served over plain HTTP · The TLS certificate is expired or about to exp · No mobile viewport tag · The page title is missing or the wrong length · The meta description is missing or the wrong l · The page has no H1, or more than one · Images have no alt text

All published audits · Check reference