Low impact · weight 3 · worth up to 0.6 points of the total score
A sitemap is the list of pages a site wants crawled. Without one Google finds pages only by following links, so new or thinly linked pages can take weeks to be discovered.
Publish a sitemap at /sitemap.xml (most CMSs and frameworks generate one) and name it in robots.txt with a `Sitemap:` line.
Check a page for this, and the other 75 checks at once
Search and AI answers may quote the page
nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet tell Google how much of the page it may show. They also govern Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page that forbids snippets is not quoted there either, and a very short max-snippet leaves it little to quote.
Missing pages answer 404
When an address that does not exist answers 200, search engines index error pages as real ones, and a broken link on another site looks like it works. Sending every missing page to the homepage is treated the same way: Google calls it a soft 404. We ask the site for a page that cannot exist and look at the answer.
Page describes itself with structured data
schema.org markup tells search engines what the page is: an article, a product with a price, a business with an address. Without it Google infers that from the text, and rich results such as stars, prices and FAQs are not available at all. It is often sold as a way into AI answers; measured, it is not: a 2025 Ahrefs study of 1,885 pages found no effect on AI citations, and AI assistants fetching a page live do not read JSON-LD. Add it for Google's rich results.
Title and H1 are related but not identical
The title is written for the search results page and the H1 for the visitor who already clicked. Making them byte-identical wastes a second chance to describe the page, while sharing no vocabulary at all suggests the two disagree about the topic.
