Sitemap discovery: what it measures

The check reads the response your server returns and records what it found. That observation is stored with the report, so reopening an old audit shows what was true on the day it ran rather than what the page says now. It is not a live measurement, and it is not a model’s opinion of your page.

Ruleset sitemap · category files · can count towards the checklist score

• —Whether the listed URLs work. The sitemap validator samples them.
• —Whether every page on the site is listed.

Publish a sitemap, keep it current, and declare it in robots.txt.

Then verify it yourself rather than trusting the next report: reload the page, view the source, and look at the thing the check described. A check you can falsify in ten seconds is the only kind worth having.

The free sitemap validator checks this on one URL and needs no signup — the same rule, on the same page, with no credit spent. When you want the whole page assessed, an audit is covered by the trial credit.

• robots.txt discovery

All checks and their definitions as JSON