What it measures

This check verifies whether your site has a valid, accessible XML sitemap — either at the default /sitemap.xml location or declared in your robots.txt file.

Why it matters for AI

An XML sitemap is a roadmap that tells AI crawlers about every important page on your site. Without it, crawlers have to discover pages by following links — which means they may miss pages that aren't well-linked. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot all check for sitemaps to ensure comprehensive coverage.

How to improve

1. Create an XML sitemap — List all important pages with their last-modified dates
2. Submit to Google Search Console — This also helps AI crawlers that piggyback on Google's index
3. Keep it updated — Add new pages and remove deleted ones automatically
4. Declare it in robots.txt — Add Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt