Find your sitemap, prove it parses, and see what it is actually telling Google.
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A sitemap is how you tell a search engine which URLs you consider worth crawling. It does not force indexing, and it will not rescue a page nothing links to — but a missing or broken one slows discovery on exactly the sites that need it most: large catalogues, new sites, and anything with weak internal linking.
This looks in the standard places, follows the pointer in robots.txt, follows a sitemap index down one level to its children, and reports what it finds: URL count against the 50,000 limit, whether lastmod dates are present, and whether the listed URLs are on the same host and using HTTPS.
The most common failure is not a missing file. It is a sitemap that returns an HTML error page, or one generated once at launch and never regenerated, which by now is a list of what the site used to be.
On a site with thousands of URLs, discovery is a real constraint — Google crawls what it can find, in the order it finds it. A correct sitemap is the cheapest way to shorten the gap between publishing something and it appearing in search, and it unlocks the Search Console coverage report, which is the best free diagnostic in SEO.
A sitemap that returns 200, parses as XML, is linked from robots.txt, lists only canonical indexable HTTPS URLs on your own domain, carries lastmod dates that change when content changes, and is regenerated automatically rather than by hand.
Each of these has a full entry in our issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
No sitemap to tell search engines what exists.
A page tells search engines to hide it from results.
A checker that hands you a list and walks away has done half the job. Here is what each kind of finding means and what it is worth doing about it.
A twenty-page site with decent internal linking will be crawled fine without one. Publish one anyway — it costs nothing, and the coverage report it unlocks in Search Console tells you what Google thinks of every URL.
If the URL returns a page rather than XML, crawlers get nothing and you believe you are covered. This is what a plugin looks like when it breaks, and it is invisible in a browser because the browser renders the error page happily.
Most generators exclude noindexed and canonicalised-away pages deliberately, which is correct. A count that is an order of magnitude too small usually means a post type or collection was never added.
Filter URLs, tag archives and paginated views padding the file out. Every one of them is a page you are asking a crawler to spend time on instead of the ones that sell.
A stale sitemap is a list of instructions to waste crawl budget. If a URL is in the file it should return 200 and be the canonical version — anything else contradicts what the rest of your site says.
Listing a URL says "crawl and index this"; the page then says the opposite. Search engines resolve the contradiction themselves, and not always the way you would.
Google ignores both. Only lastmod carries weight, and only when it is honest — a file where every page changed today is treated as a file where nothing did.
A sitemap edited manually is a sitemap that is wrong by the end of the month. Every platform can generate one; if yours cannot, that is the thing to fix.
The setting is in a different place on every platform, and that is usually what stands between knowing and fixing.
Yoast, Rank Math and core WordPress each generate one, and having two plugins do it at once is a common source of confusion. Pick one, disable the others, and confirm the Sitemap line in robots.txt points at the one you kept.
Generated automatically at /sitemap.xml as an index of child files for products, collections, pages and blogs. You cannot edit it, so the lever is what you publish and what you leave unpublished.
Turn on auto-generation under project settings → SEO. If you pasted a manual sitemap at launch it will still be served, and it will not have grown with the CMS.
Generated automatically at /sitemap.xml with no configuration. Everything you can control is whether a page is enabled and whether it is hidden from search in its SEO panel.
app/sitemap.ts only lists what you tell it to, so query the same source your routes come from. A hard-coded array is a sitemap that stops being true the first time someone publishes something.
More on your platform: SEO audits by platform.
One file, read carefully — because the expensive mistakes all live in it.
The tag that decides which URL gets the credit — checked properly.
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
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