Sitemap 404s

What this check looks for

For every sitemap URL that was also crawled, this check compares its recorded status code. A status of 400 or above (or no response at all) fails, quoting the status returned. Sitemap URLs that weren't crawled are skipped since their status is unknown. A sitemap with no broken, crawled entries passes; a scan with no sitemap URLs available reports "na".

Why it matters

A sitemap is supposed to be a curated, trustworthy list of URLs worth indexing — when a meaningful share of its entries 404, search engines start treating the whole sitemap as less reliable, which can slow how quickly they trust and process new additions to it. It's a maintenance signal too: sitemap 404s usually mean pages were deleted or moved without updating (or regenerating) the sitemap that references them. AI crawlers that use sitemaps to prioritize what to fetch waste the same crawl budget hitting dead URLs, time that could otherwise go toward reading your live, citable content.

How to fix it

Remove dead entries from the sitemap, or restore the pages if they were deleted by mistake:

<!-- Sitemap lists a page that no longer exists -->
<url>
  <loc>https://www.acme.com/products/discontinued-2019</loc>
</url>

Regenerate the sitemap from your live content source rather than maintaining it by hand, so deleted or moved pages drop out automatically instead of lingering as dead entries.