Sitemap checker

Answer engines ground their responses on pages that were discovered and crawled first, and sitemaps remain the cheapest discovery channel you control. ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Gemini all draw on crawl infrastructure that finds URLs the same ways classic search does: links and sitemaps. A page missing from both waits for a crawler to stumble onto it, and a new comparison page or pricing update can sit unread for weeks while engines keep citing whatever they fetched last.

Freshness signals matter more than most teams assume. Google documents that it uses lastmod when the dates prove consistently accurate, and drops trust in them when they lie. A sitemap that stamps every URL with today's date on every deploy trains crawlers to ignore your dates entirely, which slows recrawl of the pages that genuinely changed.

First check where the sitemap was found. Best case, robots.txt declares it and the standard path serves it, so every crawler finds it without guessing. A sitemap that exists but goes undeclared in robots.txt is flagged, since the declaration costs one line and removes the guessing. The index versus flat distinction is informational: an index file pointing at child sitemaps is the right shape for large sites, while a flat file is fine below roughly ten thousand URLs.

Then look at the URL count against your expectations. A count far below the pages you publish means sections are invisible to the file, and a count far above suggests parameter noise or stale entries. Finally, the lastmod report shows coverage and spread: dates on every URL with a realistic spread of ages is the healthy pattern, while identical timestamps across thousands of URLs is the pattern crawlers learn to distrust.

Add the Sitemap line to robots.txt if it is missing, since that is the one-minute fix. Then repair lastmod: make it reflect real content changes or remove it, because false dates are worse than absent ones. Then prune URLs that redirect or 404, as error-heavy sitemaps waste your crawl attention. Discovery is the first half of visibility; whether engines then cite you is measurable, and Reachroller measures it question by question from $29 per month with a free 3-day trial.