The sitemap you set up once and never checked again
A sitemap.xml helps search engines discover and crawl your pages efficiently.
But a single stray character makes the whole file invalid XML — and crawlers just
silently skip it. Or it points at an old path after a migration. Or it's empty.
Nothing tells you. You just get crawled less thoroughly.
I added a free sitemap check to OGCheck (alongside its Open Graph
and robots.txt checks).
Check it in one request
curl "https://ogcheck-app.azurewebsites.net/sitemap?url=https://your-site.com"
It confirms your sitemap is reachable (not a 404/500), is valid XML, and
actually lists URLs rather than being empty — and tells you how many.
The sitemap problems that quietly cost you crawl budget
-
Invalid XML — one unescaped
&or stray tag breaks the whole file for crawlers. - Empty sitemap — generated once, never repopulated after a CMS change.
- Unreachable — a 404 or 500 after a migration or a misconfigured route.
- Not referenced in robots.txt — search engines have to guess it's there.
While you're at it
The same free API also checks your robots.txt (/robots?url=…) and your social
preview / og:image (/check?url=…). It's zero-dependency (pure Python stdlib),
open source: https://github.com/rahulatrkm/ogcheck.
What else silently breaks your site's visibility that a one-request check could
catch? Genuinely curious — feedback welcome.
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