URL: /rules/crawl/sitemap-exists

---
title: "Sitemap Exists"
description: "Checks if XML sitemap exists and is referenced in robots.txt"
---

Checks if XML sitemap exists and is referenced in robots.txt

| | |
|---|---|
| **Rule ID** | `crawl/sitemap-exists` |
| **Category** | [Crawlability](/rules/crawl) |
| **Scope** | Site-wide |
| **Severity** | error |
| **Weight** | 10/10 |

## Solution

XML sitemaps help search engines discover and index your pages. Create a sitemap.xml at your domain root listing all important pages. Reference it in robots.txt with 'Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml'. Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Keep it under 50MB and 50,000 URLs per file; use a sitemap index for larger sites.

## Enable / Disable

### Disable this rule

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["crawl/sitemap-exists"]
```

### Disable all Crawlability rules

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["crawl/*"]
```

### Enable only this rule

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
enable = ["crawl/sitemap-exists"]
disable = ["*"]
```