Is your sitemap.xml present and valid?

What the check looks at

The check looks for the sitemap where crawlers look — /sitemap.xml and the Sitemap: line in robots.txt — fetches it, and checks that it parses as a sitemap or a sitemap index with absolute URLs.

Why it matters

Crawlers discover pages by following links and by reading the sitemap. Without a valid one, new or deep pages are found late or never; with one, every page you want found is listed in one machine-readable place, with the date it last changed.

How to see it on your own site

Open /sitemap.xml. It should be XML with or , every an absolute URL on your domain, and a that is true.

How to fix it

• Generate it from the site, never by hand: every CMS and framework has a sitemap plugin or route.
• Reference it in robots.txt: Sitemap: https://yourdomain/sitemap.xml.
• Keep honest — a sitemap where every page changed today is ignored.

What the agent does: the agent serves a sitemap built from the pages the site publishes — one click, and it stays current.

Related checks

• robots.txt allows AI crawlers
• Pages link to each other
• Canonical tags point to the page itself

Read next

• How do I get my business into Google AI Mode and AI Overviews?
• How to get cited by Perplexity (it shows its sources)

Part of the 23 checks · group: Crawler access — robots.txt, CDN/bot filter, login walls, noindex, HTTP status, sitemap, canonical.