Sitemap monitoring for complete coverage visibility

Sitemap Monitoring discovers your sitemap tree automatically from the Sitemap: directive in your robots.txt, then walks supported sitemap indexes down to leaf files. It supports XML and text sitemap files, including gzip-compressed responses, and catalogs declared URLs per leaf sitemap along with lastmod, changefreq, and priority when present. Nested or recursive sitemap indexes are not supported and are flagged as unsupported. The discovery cycle re-checks daily as part of your site’s daily snapshot; an individual sitemap file is re-fetched daily when it supports cache validators such as ETag or Last-Modified, otherwise it can go up to about a week between fetches. Sitemap Monitoring is available on Starter and above; compare plans on the pricing page.

Once Sitemap Monitoring has successfully completed its first full discovery cycle, WebPixie cross-checks it against the Link Crawler: crawled internal links that are not present in your declared sitemap are labeled "not found in your sitemap". This surfaces pages engines may never discover through your sitemap, such as a new page you forgot to add or an old URL your sitemap generator dropped. It is a coverage signal, not a health check: the label only compares sitemap membership against crawled internal links, it does not mean the page is broken or blocked. Sitemap Monitoring is available on Starter and above; see the pricing page for details.

The Indexability Checker only reports whether a Sitemap: directive is present in your robots.txt, a presence check. Sitemap Monitoring goes further: it actually fetches the declared sitemap tree, walks supported sitemap indexes down to leaf files, and catalogs declared URLs with lastmod, changefreq, and priority when present. It also cross-checks sitemap coverage against the Link Crawler, flagging crawled internal links that are missing from your sitemap. Sitemap Monitoring is available on Starter and above, while the robots.txt presence check is included on every plan; compare plans on the pricing page.

No. Sitemap Monitoring surfaces its findings in the dashboard for review; it does not open incidents or send notifications. WebPixie's automated incidents and alerts come only from uptime, SSL, and domain events, such as a site going down or a certificate failing its check. Sitemap Monitoring instead catalogs your declared URLs and flags things worth reviewing, like a sitemap index it could not fully process or a crawled internal link that is missing from your sitemap. Those coverage signals sit next to your other site data so you can act on them during review, rather than as a paged alert. If you want events that notify you, incident management tracks the availability and certificate events above. Sitemap Monitoring is available on Starter and above; compare plans on the pricing page.

Sitemap Monitoring supports standard XML and plain-text sitemap files, including gzip-compressed responses. During discovery it reads your sitemap index and walks the sitemaps it references down to the leaf files, then catalogs every declared URL along with its lastmod, changefreq, and priority when present. The sitemap protocol allows up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB per file; on top of that, WebPixie applies its own processing caps, reading up to 10,000 URLs per sitemap file, up to 100 sitemap files per site each discovery cycle, and up to 50,000 sitemap URLs per site in total, while a file over 50 MB is skipped as too large. Most sites stay well within these limits, and splitting a large sitemap into multiple files under one index keeps every page covered. WebPixie discovers your sitemaps automatically from the Sitemap: directive in robots.txt, and that reference is also validated by the Indexability Checker. For more on discovery, see Sitemap Monitoring, available on Starter and above on the pricing page.

No, and neither do search engines. A sitemap index file may list individual sitemap files, but it cannot list other sitemap index files, so a nested or recursive index (an index that points to another index) is outside the sitemap protocol. Google states this directly: a sitemap index file can't list other sitemap index files, only sitemap files (opens in new tab). Sitemap Monitoring follows the same rule: it walks a normal sitemap index down to its leaf files, but when it meets a nested sitemap index it flags that entry as unsupported instead of following it further. If you see that flag, the fix is to flatten the structure so your top-level index points directly at sitemap files, which also keeps your sitemaps discoverable by search engines. Sitemap Monitoring is available on Starter and above; compare plans on the pricing page.