Do you have a crawler-friendly sitemap.xml?

When search engines or auditing platforms visit your site they expect a clean sitemap.xml. A broken or poorly formatted sitemap wastes crawl budget, hides new pages, and triggers avoidable health errors in reports.

A minimal sitemap must follow the Sitemaps XML protocol. Start by using UTF-8 encoding, include the XML declaration, and wrap every entry inside a <urlset> element with the official namespace. Here is a solid foundation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2024-04-10</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Good format checklist

1. Host the file at https://example.com/sitemap.xml with a 200 response, UTF-8 encoding, and application/xml content type
2. Keep the file under 50 MB or 50 000 URLs; split into multiple sitemaps with an index file when you exceed either limit
3. Use absolute canonical URLs that return 200 responses and avoid query-string duplicates
4. Provide <lastmod> in YYYY-MM-DD (or full ISO 8601) so tools can prioritise recent content
5. Only include pages you want indexed; omit noindex, robots.txt-blocked, or paginated duplicates
6. Update the sitemap whenever you publish, move, or remove pages so crawlers detect changes quickly
7. Reference the sitemap in robots.txt and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for extra visibility
8. Gzip large sitemaps and ensure the compressed version stays within limits before linking it in the sitemap index

Tips for Semrush crawls

• Run the Semrush Site Audit after each release to confirm the sitemap is reachable and free of format errors
• Use the Semrush Crawl Comparison report to ensure new sitemaps reduce warnings such as "Incorrect Page URL" or "Sitemap XML format error"
• Monitor the Semrush Issues tab for "Submitted URL not found"; fix by removing stale URLs or redirecting them before the next crawl
• Combine Semrush alerts with Search Console crawl stats so you can spot indexation drops early