site.sitemap-error

What to change

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on a crawl or a build directory. An error is a problem that keeps a page out of search or out of answers, or breaks how it shows there. Each finding takes 15 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.sitemap-error

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.sitemap-error"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.sitemap-error on the command, or disableRules: ["site.sitemap-error"] to a tool.

• Warningsite.robots-txt-unsupported-rulerobots.txt uses rules Google does not support: noindex or nofollow lines (retired in 2019, so the pages stay indexable; warning) or crawl-delay (Google ignores it, Bing reads it; info).
• Warningsite.robots-txt-invalid-rulerobots.txt has lines crawlers cannot use: an Allow or Disallow path that starts with neither / nor * (a full URL included), which matches no URL; an Allow or Disallow above the first User-agent line, which belongs to no group; or a Sitemap that is not a full URL, which search engines ignore.
• Warningsite.robots-blocks-resourcesrobots.txt keeps Googlebot from scripts or stylesheets the pages load, so Google renders the pages without them.
• Warningsite.sitemap-missingNo XML sitemap was found (robots.txt Sitemap: line or /sitemap.xml).
• Errorsite.sitemap-too-largeA sitemap holds more than 50,000 URLs or more than 50 MB uncompressed, which search engines do not read (error); or it is larger than this audit reads (15 MB; 5 MB on the hosted server), so it was not checked (info).
• Warningsite.sitemap-index-nestedA sitemap index lists another sitemap index; Google reads only sitemaps from an index, not further indexes.
• Warningsite.sitemap-invalid-urlSitemap <loc> values that are not full http(s) URLs, or are 2,048 characters or longer. Search engines crawl sitemap URLs exactly as listed and drop these, so the pages they name are not submitted.
• Warningsite.sitemap-lastmod-invalidSitemap <lastmod> values are not in W3C Datetime format, so search engines ignore them.