# XML sitemap

The URL inventory agents and crawlers use for discovery.

**[Discoverability](/docs/discoverability)** · checked once per host (item type `sitemap`) · 6 checks that can fail it

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** (L4)

Standard equipment on the web. Its absence is the exception rather than its presence. Direction of travel: ► flat, as of 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.

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

## Examples

These are the fixtures the test suite runs through the real collector, not snippets written for a document.

- Correct: `test/e2e/test-pages/discoverability/correct.sitemap.xml`
- Present but wrong: `test/e2e/test-pages/discoverability/issues.sitemap.xml`

## Specifications

| Document | Revision | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| [Sitemaps XML protocol](https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html) | 0.9 | specification |

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