Check 5 of 23 · Can AI find the rest of your site?

You have a sitemap

A sitemap is a list of every page on your site. Robots use it to find pages they would never reach by clicking around.

  • Who fixes itYou can do this
  • TimeAbout 10 minutes
  • Worth6 of 100 points
  • How sure we areProven

What this is

A sitemap is a plain list of your pages. It looks like this to a robot:

https://yourbusiness.com/
https://yourbusiness.com/services
https://yourbusiness.com/about

It lives at an address like https://yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml. Your robots.txt can also point to it. See Your robots.txt file works.

Without a sitemap, a robot has to find your pages by following links, one by one. Pages with no link pointing to them never get found.

Why it matters to you

This is a solid check, 6 points. A robot that only finds your homepage can only ever cite your homepage. Your services page, your about page, your “what to expect on the first visit” page, all of that is where the useful answers are. The sitemap is the map to it.

Nearly every website platform makes one for you. This check mostly fails when the map exists but is hidden somewhere we could not find, or is empty.

What we look for

We look in four places: /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml, and any address your robots.txt declares with a Sitemap: line.

  • Pass: we found a real sitemap and it lists at least one page.
  • Warn: we found a sitemap but it lists no pages, or it is only a compressed file we could not open. You get about a third of the points.
  • Fail: no sitemap at any of those places, or robots.txt points at one that is not there.

Whether you can fix this yourself

Yes. In most cases the sitemap already exists and you only need to tell robots where it is. If you would rather not, Setup ($350, 3 business days) does it for you.

Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and SimplePractice all build a sitemap for you at /sitemap.xml. If you are on one of those and this failed, something is blocking the file, most often a firewall. See Your server answers an AI crawler.

How to fix it

First, add a line to robots.txt so robots know where to look. Swap in your real domain and the real address of your sitemap:

Sitemap: https://yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml

WordPress

WordPress makes one at /wp-sitemap.xml by itself. Yoast SEO and Rank Math make a better one at /sitemap_index.xml, and add the robots.txt line for you. Open the plugin’s settings and make sure the sitemap feature is switched on.

Squarespace or Wix

You already have one at /sitemap.xml, so there is nothing to build. If the check failed, search your platform’s help for “sitemap” to confirm the address, then look at the firewall article above.

Shopify

Same. It is at /sitemap.xml and cannot be turned off.

Your own site or a developer

Most frameworks have a sitemap package (Astro, Next.js, Hugo and Jekyll all do). Turn it on, publish, and add the robots.txt line.

How to check it worked

Go to your site address with /sitemap.xml on the end. You should see a list of your page addresses, possibly with dates next to them. Then run the free check again.

Do not worry about

A sitemap that is only a list of other sitemaps (a “sitemap index”). That is normal for WordPress. We follow it and count the pages inside.