The Artifact Machine Sitemap Health Audit

A small artifact for checking whether a website exposes a healthy XML sitemap with useful discovery and freshness signals.

Use this Actor before a site launch, migration, SEO review, or monthly crawlability check. It gives teams a compact report on whether a sitemap exists, how it was discovered, how many URLs it exposes, and whether its metadata is useful enough for search and AI crawlers.

Pulled from The Artifact Machine: generated, tested, and cleaned up by a human.

What It Checks

• robots.txt sitemap declarations
• common sitemap locations such as /sitemap.xml
• sitemap index files and child sitemap files
• URL count, duplicate URL count, cross-host URLs, and HTTP URLs
• lastmod coverage, stale dates, future dates, and most recent update date
• fetch and parse errors that make the sitemap unreliable

Best For

• SEO and GEO audits
• website migration checks
• ecommerce sitemap reviews
• agency client diagnostics
• monthly crawlability monitoring

Input

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "maxSitemapFiles": 10,
  "maxUrls": 500,
  "includeSamples": true
}

Input Fields

• url: homepage or canonical site URL to audit.
• maxSitemapFiles: maximum sitemap index and child sitemap files to fetch.
• maxUrls: maximum sitemap URLs to parse into the report.
• includeSamples: include small URL samples in the output for debugging and client review.

Output

The Actor writes one dataset item and an OUTPUT key-value record with:

• composite score and grade
• sitemap discovery method and fetched sitemap files
• URL inventory and freshness stats
• issue counts by severity
• actionable issues with impact and how-to-fix guidance

Example output fields:

• score: 0-100 sitemap health score
• grade: A-F score band
• issueCounts: issue totals by severity
• checks.discovery: sitemap discovery and fetch results
• checks.inventory: URL count, duplicates, protocol, host checks
• checks.freshness: lastmod coverage and date quality
• issues: prioritized fix list

Limits

• This Actor audits sitemap files reachable from one submitted website origin.
• It does not crawl an entire website.
• It caps fetched sitemap files and parsed URLs to keep runs predictable.
• It does not guarantee search indexing or AI citation.
• Some sites block automated requests differently from regular browsers, so results should be reviewed before client delivery.

Pricing

Use pay-per-event pricing based on completed reports rather than per issue. Suggested starting price: $1.00 to $2.00 per completed sitemap health report after private runtime cost is measured.