Sitemap Availability

Sitemap Availability checks whether your site serves a valid XML sitemap that AI crawlers can fetch. That sitemap is the machine-readable map of your URLs, and systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity use it to find your pages. friendly4AI scores how much of your site that sitemap actually lists — measured against the pages your own page links to — from 100 down to 0 (no sitemap found, or a discovered sitemap URL that turns out to be inaccessible).

What does this parameter measure?

It measures whether a working XML sitemap is reachable on your site. friendly4AI fetches https://{domain}/sitemap.xml, follows any sitemap references it finds during discovery, and validates that the file is a real <urlset> or <sitemapindex>. When nothing can be fetched, the scan falls back to the homepage HTML and looks for a <link rel="sitemap"> tag, an href ending in sitemap*.xml, or a plain text mention of "sitemap". Along the way it reads <lastmod> dates and counts how many fall inside a 90-day freshness window, and it compares the sitemap's <loc> entries against the internal pages the scanned page links to.

Why does a sitemap matter for AI-readiness?

Without a sitemap, AI crawlers see only the pages your homepage links to. Anything deep or unlinked never reaches the index that ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity draw on. A sitemap hands crawlers the full URL map up front, so coverage improves and new pages surface sooner. Accurate <lastmod> dates do extra work here: they tell AI systems which pages changed recently and deserve a re-fetch. Sitemaps work alongside robots.txt accessibility and URL stability as the core discovery signals.

How is Sitemap Availability scored?

Coverage, not size. Until August 2026 full marks required a <sitemapindex> or more than 1000 URLs, which meant a small site with a complete sitemap could not reach 100 no matter how correct its file was — and the only way to clear the band was to publish URLs that do not exist. The parameter now measures what its name claims: whether the sitemap lists the site.

• Pass (100) — a valid sitemap listing at least 80% of the internal pages the scanned page links to. When coverage cannot be measured at all, a <sitemapindex> or a sitemap holding more than 1000 URLs scores 100 instead: a sitemap index lists child files rather than pages, and a page with too few internal links offers no sample.
• Partial — everything between. Coverage of 50-80% scores 75; a sitemap that misses most of the linked pages scores 50, as does a valid but minimal sitemap with nothing to compare against, or a fetched file in a non-standard or invalid format; a sitemap explicitly linked from the page but not fetched directly scores 75; a page that only mentions "sitemap" in text with no actionable link scores 25. Anything that is not 100 or 0 shows as Partial in your report — 75 is a good result, not a passing one.
• Fail (0) — no sitemap signals at all, or a sitemap URL that was discovered but came back inaccessible.

When coverage cannot be measured, it is not counted against you. If the scanned page has fewer than five internal links — a single-page app shell, or a page whose main content links nowhere — there is nothing to compare the sitemap to, so the older size bands decide instead. An unmeasurable ratio is not a bad one.

How do you fix Sitemap Availability issues?

• Publish a valid sitemap.xml at your site root that lists every important page. Most platforms — WordPress, Shopify, Next.js — generate one for you.
• Confirm the file returns well-formed XML with a <urlset> or <sitemapindex> root. A malformed file scores Partial even when it exists.
• Keep your sitemap at a non-standard path? Point to it from robots.txt with Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml so discovery can find it.
• Add accurate <lastmod> dates and keep them current. Recent dates strengthen the freshness signal.
• List the pages you actually link to. The score compares your sitemap against your own internal links, so the fastest fix is usually the handful of pages the sitemap forgot — not adding volume.
• Do not pad the file. Coverage is checked before size, so inventing URLs to cross a count threshold changes nothing while your real pages stay missing — and it never helped your visitors.
• On large sites, split the sitemap into a <sitemapindex> of child sitemaps — still full marks, and easier to maintain.
• Re-scan after publishing to confirm the file is fetched and validates.