Sitemap vs crawl — cross-referenced.

Sitemap Audit

XML sitemaps tell search engines which pages you want indexed. But sitemaps often drift from reality — containing deleted pages, redirects, or non-canonical URLs while missing important new pages. EchoBat cross-references your sitemap entries against actual crawl results to identify discrepancies. This reveals pages in your sitemap that return errors, indexable pages missing from the sitemap, and canonical mismatches between sitemap URLs and actual canonical tags.

How It Works

EchoBat fetches and parses XML sitemaps during the Discovery phase. During the crawl, it records the actual status code and canonical tag for every URL. The Sitemap Health lens then cross-references: sitemap entries are checked against crawl results, and crawled indexable pages are checked against sitemap entries. Discrepancies are grouped by type and ranked by severity.

Proof Returned in the Report

Every Sitemap Audit finding is tied to crawl evidence: affected URLs, the source signal, severity, score impact, and the next action exposed in the portal, CLI JSON, and MCP tools.

Sample Evidence Fields

  • Missing Sitemap: Detects if no XML sitemap exists at standard locations or in robots.txt.
  • Sitemap URLs Not Crawled: URLs listed in the sitemap that were never reached during the crawl.
  • Non-200 Sitemap Entries: Sitemap URLs returning 301, 404, 410, 500, or other non-200 status codes.

Why It Matters

  • Find drift between your sitemap and actual site state
  • Remove dead URLs that waste crawl budget in the sitemap
  • Discover indexable pages missing from the sitemap
  • Catch canonical mismatches that confuse search engines

Related pages