Sitemap checks

DomainCare discovers and fetches your sitemap.xml on every check cycle, verifies it is well-formed XML, and counts the <loc> entries inside. A missing or invalid sitemap reduces search engine crawl coverage for your domain.

What it monitors

• Discovery — checks Sitemap: directives in robots.txt first; falls back to /sitemap_index.xml then /sitemap.xml
• HTTP availability — whether the resolved URL returns a 2xx response
• XML structure — whether the document starts with a valid XML or sitemap root element and has balanced tags
• URL count — the number of <loc> elements present in the sitemap body
• Content type — the Content-Type header returned with the response
• File size — body size in bytes, capped at 10 MB for analysis

How often it runs

The sitemap check runs every 24 hours (86,400 seconds) by default. Pro and Business plans can override this per domain via per-check controls. Discovery runs on each cycle — if your robots.txt is updated to point at a new sitemap URL, the next check cycle will follow the new pointer automatically.

Files larger than 10 MB are truncated before analysis. The URL count and validity check apply only to the first 10 MB of content.

Alerts this check produces

Event	Tone	When it fires
sitemap_missing_or_invalid	Warning	No sitemap found at any candidate URL, or the file is not well-formed XML, or it contains zero <loc> entries
sitemap_recovered	Recovery	A valid sitemap with at least one URL is found again after a sitemap_missing_or_invalid event

What to do when alerts fire

• sitemap_missing_or_invalid — no sitemap found. Generate and publish a sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Most CMS platforms (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Next.js with next-sitemap) produce this automatically. Add a Sitemap: directive to your robots.txt to help DomainCare and search engines find it:

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

• sitemap_missing_or_invalid — invalid XML. Validate your sitemap with an XML linter. Common causes are unclosed tags, invalid characters in URL values, or a server error page being served at the sitemap path.

• sitemap_missing_or_invalid — zero URLs. Your sitemap file is reachable and parses as XML, but contains no <loc> elements. Check whether your sitemap generator is running correctly and that it has access to your content index.

• File too large. If your sitemap exceeds 10 MB, split it into a sitemap index file that references multiple smaller sitemaps. The sitemaps.org protocol supports this natively.

• Wait for sitemap_recovered. Once a valid sitemap with at least one URL is reachable, DomainCare clears the alert automatically.

Related

• Robots.txt checks
• Uptime checks