Correctness · document 03

Sitemap Quality Monitor

In the workspace: /sitemap-quality

Availability

Included on every plan, including the free trial

This document is open to every reader on every plan. Availability tells you what a plan includes; it does not decide what you may read.

What it is for

A sitemap is the list of pages you hand to a search engine: a claim about what matters on your site. When that list points at addresses that are broken, redirected, or explicitly refusing to be indexed, you are spending crawl budget to contradict yourself. This monitor takes a sample of the addresses in the sitemap you serve and reports what each one actually answers.

How to use it

Select the project. The monitor finds the sitemap your site publishes rather than asking you where it is.
Run the check and let it finish. It requests a bounded sample of addresses one at a time, so a large sitemap takes longer than a small one.
Work through the broken group first, then the redirected group. Both are instructions you did not intend to publish.
Re-run after you have corrected the sitemap, and compare the counts.

Reading the result

Findings are grouped by what a search engine would do with them: healthy, redirected, broken, and non-indexable. A redirected address is not an error in itself; it is a detour you are asking every crawler to take on every visit. A non-indexable address in a sitemap is a direct contradiction: the list says "index this" and the page says "do not".

What it cannot tell you

It reports the state of the addresses in the sample at the moment of the run. It is a sample and says so: a clean sample is evidence of health, not a guarantee that every remaining address is sound. It also cannot tell you whether a page deserves to be in the sitemap, only whether it answers as the sitemap implies.

What it keeps

Nothing beyond this browser session. The sample, the addresses it requested and their verdicts are held while you are signed in and cleared when you leave. Nothing about your sitemap is written to the database, so a run tomorrow starts from your live file rather than from a stored copy of it.