What this checks
- Well-formed XML with a
<urlset>or<sitemapindex>root and the sitemap namespace. - Every entry has a valid, absolute
<loc>on the same host, with no duplicates. lastmoduses the W3C date format and is not in the future;changefreqandpriorityuse allowed values.- The protocol limit of 50,000 URLs per file. Gzip-compressed sitemaps are supported.
- For a URL sitemap: the status of the first 10 listed URLs. For an index: whether the first 3 child sitemaps load and parse.
What a good sitemap contains
Only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200: no redirects, no 404s, no pages marked noindex, and no parameter variations. lastmod should change only when the content really changes. Google ignores changefreq and priority, so they can be left out.
Sitemaps do not guarantee indexing
A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs, but each engine decides what to crawl and index. Studio cannot see which listed URLs are indexed; Google Search Console's sitemap report and Page indexing report show that. Submit your sitemap there, and reference it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line.
Limitations
- Sitemaps larger than 10 MB (uncompressed) are not analyzed. The protocol allows up to 50 MB.
- URL status is sampled (first 10 URLs), not checked for every URL. A full crawl will be part of the website health check.
- Sitemap index files are followed one level deep, for the first 3 child sitemaps.
- XML with DOCTYPE or entity declarations is rejected for security; valid sitemaps never need them.