Free tools / Sitemap checker
Is your sitemap doing its job?
Four in ten of the 400 most popular npm packages' sites have no sitemap, and one in eleven stamps every URL with the same date, which Google stops trusting. This check fetches the sitemap the way a crawler does and reports what it found.
Questions
Why does a uniform lastmod matter?
Google uses lastmod only while it proves accurate and ignores it once it does not. A sitemap whose every URL carries the build time carries no freshness signal at all.
My sitemap answers 200 but the check says it is missing.
Single-page apps often answer every path with the app shell, so /sitemap.xml returns HTML with a 200. The check reads the body, not the status.
Do I need IndexNow?
Only with a sitemap whose dates are right: Bing's advice is an accurate lastmod paired with IndexNow. Google does not use it. The check reports it as a notice, and only when the site has a sitemap.
The other free checks
- AI crawler access checker
- robots.txt AI crawler checker
- llms.txt checker
- Structured data checker
- Security headers checker
- Full SEO and AI-search audit
- AI visibility checker
All of them run locally too: npx @rankcli/cli audit --url yoursite.com.