XML sitemap — agent readiness

Why an agent cares

It is the one place a site states which URLs it wants found, so a broken or out-of-scope sitemap quietly costs coverage. Discovered from robots.txt Sitemap: directives, then followed through index files.

Adoption

Web baseline. Standard equipment on the web. Its absence is the exception rather than its presence.

Direction of travel: ► flat, as at 2026-07-28.

The sitemaps.org protocol, universally consumed by crawlers since 2006.

What we check

Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only once sitemapPresent is true, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 6 of these 7 can fail it. In a Lumar crawl these land on one row per site, in the crawl-level table where itemType is sitemap.

Check	Severity	Raises	On whose authority
`sitemapEmptyDocument`	high	conformance, usability	specification (Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9)
`sitemapMissingNamespace`	high	conformance, usability	specification (Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9)
`sitemapMalformedXml`	high	conformance, usability	specification (Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9)
`sitemapRelativeLocs`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9)
`sitemapOutOfScopeLocs`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9)
`sitemapTooLarge`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9)
`sitemapPartiallyAssessed`	coverage note	nothing	our own coverage

Examples

Both of these are fixtures the test suite runs through the real collector, not snippets written for a document: the first is a shape we score as valid, the second is one we flag.

correctxmltest/e2e/test-pages/discoverability/correct.sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- sitemapPresent + correct: well-formed XML, the sitemaps.org 0.9 namespace, absolute <loc>s. -->
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-01-01</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/products</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

present but wrongxmltest/e2e/test-pages/discoverability/issues.sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- sitemapMissingNamespace: <urlset> omits the required sitemaps.org 0.9 xmlns, so strict parsers reject it. -->
<!-- sitemapRelativeLocs: <loc>s are relative, but sitemap entries must be absolute or crawlers drop them. -->
<urlset>
  <url>
    <loc>/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>/about</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

Specifications

Document	Revision	Kind
Sitemaps XML protocol	`0.9`	specification

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-08-12.