Sitemap pages load
What we check
We take up to five pages from your sitemap and fetch each one. We prefer pages near the top of the site and ones changed recently, and we never take more than two from the same section, so the sample spreads across the site. If the sitemap is an index of other sitemaps, we read up to three of them, newest first.
A page passes if it answers normally (a 200), is a web page or plain text or Markdown, and has at least 200 characters of text. A page listed in the sitemap that errors, redirects to nowhere useful, or is served as a download fails. The score is the share of sampled pages that pass, and the detail names each page that didn’t, and why.
The same pages feed the other checks — readability, structure, structured data, and more — so one sample tells you how the site does beyond its home page. If there is no sitemap, we sample up to five links from the home page instead, and say so.
Why it matters
A sitemap is a list of pages you’re telling crawlers to visit. When those pages are broken, empty, or the wrong kind of file, a crawler spends its visit on nothing and learns to trust your list less. An AI assistant can only quote what made it into an index, and a page that fails to load never does.
This check carries the most weight in Coverage because it is the plainest test of all: you named these pages, so they should work.
How to pass
- Open each page the detail names. If it’s gone for good, take it out of the sitemap; if it moved, list the new address instead of the old one.
- Make sure every listed page answers with a 200, not a redirect or an error.
- Serve pages as HTML (or Markdown as
text/markdown), not asapplication/octet-streamor another download type. - Make sure each page has real text in it — at least a few sentences — in the HTML itself, not only after JavaScript runs.
- Generate the sitemap from the pages that exist, so it can’t drift. Most platforms and site generators do this for you.