XML sitemap

lowseo-sitemap-xmlreviewed 19 September 2026

A sitemap lists the URLs you want indexed, so crawlers do not have to find them by following links. What to include, and what to leave out.

What it is

An XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs on a site that its owner considers worth indexing, optionally with the date each was last modified. This check requests /sitemap.xml and asks whether the server returns it.

It is a hint, not an instruction. Listing a URL does not guarantee indexing, and omitting one does not prevent it — a crawler that finds a page by following a link will still consider it.

Why it matters

Link discovery has a blind spot: a page nothing links to yet is a page a crawler has no path to. That describes most new content, and every page on a site whose internal linking has gaps. A sitemap closes it directly.

The lastmod date is the part people get wrong. Stamping today's date on every URL every time the file is generated tells a crawler the whole site changed today, every day — which is not a freshness signal, it is noise, and a sitemap that cries wolf about every URL is one a crawler learns to discount. Set it from when the content actually changed, or leave it out.

How to fix it

with a reference doc

sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-01-01</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

robots.txt

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

Reference documentation

Related checks

lowrobots.txtrobots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site — /robots.txt, never anywhere else — listing which paths crawlers may and may not fetch. It is a convention that well-behaved crawlers follow voluntarily; it is not an access control, and it does not stop anyone determined from reading a page.lowCanonical tagA canonical tag (<link rel="canonical">) declares a page's preferred URL when the same content is reachable at more than one address — with and without a trailing slash, with and without a tracking query string, over http and https.highMeta robots noindexThe meta robots tag — <meta name="robots" content="..."> — gives per-page instructions to crawlers, most commonly noindex (don't show this page in search results) and nofollow (don't follow links from this page). This check fails when either is set.mediumwww and non-www canonicalizationThis check takes the host you entered, works out its counterpart — adding www. or removing it — and requests that. If the counterpart answers without redirecting to the host you entered, both are serving the site independently.

This is one of the 75 checks the scanner runs. See what we check for the full list, every severity weight, and how the score is computed from them.

What it is

Why it matters

How to fix it

Related checks

See whether your own site passes xml sitemap.