Check whether your site serves an XML sitemap at the usual location, whether robots.txt points at it, and whether crawlers have a reliable list of your pages.
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Runs the full audit on your live site. Your report opens in your dashboard.
This looks for a sitemap at the conventional path, reads robots.txt to see whether a Sitemap line declares one somewhere else, and reports the combination. A sitemap that exists but is undeclared, and a sitemap that is declared but does not resolve, are different failures and the report separates them rather than collapsing both into one message.
A sitemap does not make pages rank. It makes them discoverable, which matters most in exactly the cases where discovery is hardest: a new domain with almost no inbound links, a deep catalogue, or pages that are only reachable through a filter or a search box. For a site publishing new pages this week, the sitemap is the difference between indexing in days and indexing whenever a crawler happens to find its way there.
No sitemap and no declaration is a warning worth acting on the same day, because it is fifteen minutes of work on any modern stack. The more damaging version is a stale sitemap listing URLs that now redirect or 404, which spends crawl budget on pages you do not want and teaches a crawler that your list is unreliable. Generate it from the build rather than maintaining it by hand.
A sitemap is about discovery, and discovery is the first of four gates. The audit runs the other three on the pages the sitemap lists, so you find out whether the URLs you are asking to have crawled return something worth indexing when they are.
A declaration that resolves to nothing, from a site that migrated to https two years ago.
The sitemap exists and the declaration points at a URL that redirects twice before reaching it, over plain http, on a host the site no longer serves. It works, in the sense that a crawler patient enough to follow it gets there. It also means the one instruction whose entire job is to be unambiguous is now three hops of guesswork. The check separates a sitemap that exists but is undeclared from one that is declared and does not resolve, because they have different fixes and collapsing them into “sitemap problem” helps nobody.
# robots.txt
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml
$ curl -sI http://example.com/sitemap.xml
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
location: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xmlnoindex do not belong in it. A sitemap contradicting your own directives is a conflict something has to resolve.Anywhere reachable, but conventionally /sitemap.xml or /sitemap-index.xml at the root. Wherever it lives, declare it with a Sitemap line in robots.txt and submit it in Search Console so discovery does not depend on a guess.
Every page you want indexed, and nothing else. Signed in application screens, thank you pages and noindexed URLs do not belong there. A sitemap full of pages you have told Google to ignore is a contradiction it has to resolve.
Automatically, on every deploy. Sitemaps generated at build time are correct by construction; sitemaps maintained by hand drift within a month and then quietly mislead.
Written up properly, for the question a result usually raises next.
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