Sitemap

Opening /sitemap.xml on your domain gives a 404 or an HTML page, and your robots.txt doesn't list a sitemap that loads.

In search engines

It helps Google and Bing find new and changed pages.

In AI assistants

Bing's index feeds Copilot and other assistants; a sitemap helps it stay current.

We look for a Sitemap: line in robots.txt, then /sitemap.xml, and accept a urlset or a sitemap index.

Publish /sitemap.xml (most frameworks generate it) and add 'Sitemap: https://your-domain/sitemap.xml' to robots.txt.

• CM-102 Inner pages have their own content: Uses your sitemap first to choose which inner pages to test. This check only confirms a readable sitemap exists.
• CM-905 llms.txt: Checks for llms.txt, a proposed Markdown summary of a site that no major search engine documents using. This check looks for your sitemap, an XML list of the pages you want crawled, which Google and Bing read.

• Google: Build and submit a sitemap (opens in a new tab)