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Discoverability

How to declare a sitemap in robots.txt

robots.txt is the one location every crawler checks first. Declaring the sitemap there costs one line and removes any dependence on the file sitting at a guessable path.

What 13x checks

This is rule discoverability.sitemap-in-robots in the public registry: Sitemap is declared in robots.txt. 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
4 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.

Add one line to robots.txt:

Configuration
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

It can go anywhere in the file; it is not tied to a User-agent block.

Framework-specific versions

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

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