Technical readiness resource

Your sitemap opens. Is it actually working?

A sitemap URL can return a successful response containing your homepage. Identify an HTML fallback and serve the correct XML file.

Try opening /sitemap.xml. If you see your normal homepage, the server may be returning a fallback page instead of a sitemap. The URL loads, but the crawler still has no list of pages to read.

Look at the response body

Open the sitemap URL and inspect the response in your browser’s Network panel. Search for urlset or sitemapindex. If you see your site navigation, an app root, or a script bundle instead, the request probably reached the application fallback. A browser displaying a styled page does not mean it found a valid sitemap.

curl -i https://your-site.example/sitemap.xml
# Expected body: XML with urlset or sitemapindex
# Unexpected body: <!doctype html> and your app shell

Serve the file before the catch-all route

Check your host’s rewrite rules or server route order. Add the actual sitemap file or endpoint and make sure the general application route does not intercept it. Then test the published URL rather than a local file. If it is an index, verify each listed child file too.

Verify discovery after deployment

Run Find my pages again in SiteReadyFor.SI. A sitemap discovery source is useful evidence that the scanner parsed URLs. Compare the resulting count with the public pages you intended to publish. The scanner checks a bounded set of files, so a successful parse still does not prove complete site coverage.

References

Check your own website next.

Run an on-demand audit across crawler access, content retrieval, JSON-LD, sitemaps, and llms.txt.

Start a scan