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Sitemap not found

What it is

Asky could not load a sitemap. It appears in two forms: No sitemap found, filed on your robots.txt, when no sitemap could be found for the site at all, and Missing sitemap, filed on one sitemap URL that answers 404, 410 or another client error. An XML sitemap is the file that lists the pages you want search engines and other crawlers to find.

Why it matters

Without a sitemap, crawlers find pages only by following links, so new, deep or poorly linked pages are found late or not at all. Google  recommends one for large sites and new sites with few links, and Bing  calls sitemaps foundational to URL coverage for search and Copilot. Asky also finds your pages through your sitemap, so with none it has no pages to crawl, audit or monitor.

How Asky checks it

In daily site discovery and at the start of each audit, Asky takes the sitemaps in your robots.txt Sitemap lines and any you added in Asky. Only if there are none does it try /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml and /sitemap1.xml on your domain and its www twin, keeping the first sitemap. No sitemap found is filed when that finds nothing, unless the robots.txt fetch was blocked or got a 5xx. Missing sitemap is filed on a listed sitemap, or an index’s child, answering 404, 410 or another 4xx except 401, 403 and 429. A 5xx is a server error; a timeout or a relative URL raises nothing. Both clear once a sitemap loads.

Reported as a critical issue with high severity.

How to fix it

  1. Open the sitemap URL in the issue’s details. For No sitemap found, start with https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
  2. If the site has no sitemap, turn one on. Webflow generates one in the site’s SEO settings, WordPress serves /wp-sitemap.xml or your SEO plugin’s index, and a headless site, such as one built on Sanity, generates it in the front-end app.
  3. If your sitemap lives at another path, add a Sitemap: line with its full URL to robots.txt, or add it in Asky. Asky only tries the three standard paths.
  4. For Missing sitemap, update the robots.txt line or the URL in Asky to the working sitemap. While a listed URL exists, Asky does not look anywhere else. For a child of an index, fix the index entry or restore the file.
  5. Check the URL answers 200 with XML that starts a <urlset> or <sitemapindex>. A web page served there is reported as invalid XML instead.

Example

The robots.txt on https://example.com still points at a sitemap from the previous platform, which now answers 404:

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

# After: the address the current sitemap answers on
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

← Back to Sitemap

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Sitemap lists no pagesSitemap returns a server error