Free tool
Sitemap Analytics & Insights
What the shape of your sitemap says: URL patterns, depth, and where pages go missing.
How it works
What is the Sitemap Analytics & Insights?
The Sitemap Analytics & Insights is a free tool that reads a sitemap and shows how its URLs are organised: how many there are, which top-level folders hold them, how deep their paths go, and whether entries carry lastmod, priority and changefreq. It follows a sitemap index into up to 20 of its sitemaps before counting.
How to use the Sitemap Analytics & Insights
- Enter a sitemap URL, or just the domain to let the tool find the sitemap through robots.txt and the common paths.
- Press Analyze sitemap. If the file is a sitemap index, the tool reads up to 20 of the sitemaps it lists.
- Read the overview: total URLs, number of domains, the deepest URL path, and whether
lastmod,priorityandchangefreqappear. - Check URL Distribution by Directory for the five top-level folders with the most URLs, and URL Depth Analysis for how many URLs sit at each depth.
- Work through the recommendations, which flag missing tags, paths deeper than three levels and files over 50,000 URLs.
What can a sitemap tell you about a site's structure?
A sitemap shows what a site is mostly made of. Grouping its URLs by top-level folder turns a flat list into proportions, such as how much sits under /blog/ compared with /products/.
The surprises are usually template pages. Tag, category and paginated archive pages can outnumber the articles they link to, and each one is a URL the site is asking search engines to index.
What is URL depth, and does it affect SEO?
URL depth here is the number of segments in the path. /blog/post has a depth of two, /shop/mens/shoes/running has four, and the homepage is zero.
Path depth is not a ranking factor, and it is not the same as click depth, the number of clicks from the homepage to a page. Treat a deep path as a prompt to check the internal links to those pages, not as a reason to rename URLs.
What do the sitemap recommendations mean?
Each recommendation is a rule applied to the whole file. Act on missing <lastmod> first, because Google uses accurate <lastmod> dates to decide when to re-crawl.
Also check the Domains figure. Anything above one means the sitemap lists URLs on another host, such as a subdomain or the www. version, and search engines ignore those entries unless that host has approved them.
Questions
- How many URLs can a sitemap have?
- A single sitemap can have up to 50,000 URLs and be up to 50MB uncompressed. A larger site splits its URLs across several sitemaps and lists them in a sitemap index, which this tool follows into up to 20 of its sitemaps.
- What should a sitemap include?
- A sitemap should include only the pages you want in search results: URLs that return a 200 status, are canonical to themselves, and are not blocked or set to
noindex. Leaving out thin archive and filter pages is a deliberate choice, not an omission. - Can a page be in multiple sitemaps?
- Yes. A page can appear in more than one sitemap without causing an error. It adds nothing, though, and it inflates counts such as the total URLs here, so keep each URL in one sitemap.
- Should noindex pages be in a sitemap?
- No. A sitemap asks search engines to index the URLs it lists, so a
noindexpage in it sends contradictory signals, and Google Search Console reports it as an issue. - Is a sitemap important for SEO?
- A sitemap is important for discovery, not ranking. It helps search engines find pages, especially on new or large sites and pages with few internal links, but it does not make a page rank higher.
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