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Discoverability

How to add a sitemap.xml

A sitemap is how you tell a search engine which pages exist and when they last changed, rather than waiting for every one of them to be found by following links. Without it, pages that are not linked prominently can go months before they are crawled at all.

What 13x checks

This is rule discoverability.sitemap in the public registry: sitemap.xml exists and is reachable. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
Discoverability
Score weight
10 of the readiness score
Scope
Runs on every audited page
Applies
To every site

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

Generate a sitemap listing every indexable URL and serve it at https://example.com/sitemap.xml:

xml code
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod></lastmod>
  </url>
  <!-- one <url> per indexable page -->
</urlset>

Include only canonical, indexable URLs. Listing redirects or noindexed pages wastes crawl budget. Then declare it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.

Framework-specific versions

Where the change differs enough to be worth writing out separately.

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