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Oh Dear

Uptime can stay green

Sitemap monitoring.

Catch the broken client sitemap before the client or their customers do. Oh Dear checks the sitemap daily, validates its structure, and visits the URLs it lists.

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4.9 (73) G2
4.7 (33)
Daily by default Validates the file and its URLs
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A different kind of failure

The sitemap broke. Uptime stayed green.

The homepage can answer normally while the sitemap is missing, malformed, or handing search engines URLs that now error.

A Friday release ships. The homepage still returns 200, so uptime stays green and nothing pages anyone. Meanwhile the product sitemap is serving invalid XML, or listing a few hundred URLs that now 404 because a slug pattern changed.

Search engines find that before you do. They crawl less, index the wrong pages, and the effect shows up as a ranking slip weeks later, by which point nobody connects it to that deploy.

This check reads the file you publish and the URLs inside it, so the failure shows up as a concrete URL and a cause rather than an unexplained traffic drop.

Tony Lea
I signed up for Oh Dear for the broken link checker, which gives me peace of mind when I release new updates. Top notch product.

Tony Lea, Creator of devdojo.com

A release is exactly when the sitemap and the pages it lists stop matching.

From file to failing URL

See where the map stops working.

Oh Dear opens the sitemap or index, validates its structure, then visits the URLs it lists. The report hands the owner a URL and a cause, not a vague SEO warning.

shop.example · What this check reads Illustrative report

The sitemap file

Availability
shop.example/sitemap.xml
Structure
Duplicate URL in products.xml
Index support
Child sitemaps followed

The URLs inside

Checked URL
shop.example/products/green-chair
Response
404 Not Found
Accepted
Redirects followed, must end 2xx

Read how the check works.

Operational ownership

Send the exact sitemap error to whoever owns the fix.

Route each client site to its developer, CMS owner, or SEO partner. The alert names the failed URL and the cause, so the person receiving it does not have to go looking for which page broke.

A sitemap error on one client site is not everyone's problem. Notifications are configured per site, on the channels that team already uses.

Slack
Email
Webhook
Explore notifications and routing

No feature tiers

Every check.
Every plan.

Sitemap monitoring is included with Oh Dear's website-health checks on every plan. Choose by the number of sites you monitor, not by which checks you need.

Start with everything on.

Try sitemap monitoring alongside uptime, DNS, certificates and the rest of the website-health toolkit.

  • Sitemap monitoring on every plan
  • Every monitoring feature included
  • Plans scale by monitored site count
  • No credit card required
Start a free trial

10-day free trial. No credit card.

For the technically curious

How the sitemap check actually works.

A scheduled read of the file you publish, followed by a reachability pass over the URLs inside it.

  • Cadence and location. Daily by default, settable up to once every five days. The check looks at /sitemap.xml unless you point it at a different path for that site.
  • Structure. Oh Dear checks that the XML parses, that the file is not empty, that every <loc> is present and a valid URL, that <priority> and <changefreq> hold values the protocol allows, and that no URL is listed twice.
  • Indexes and compression. Child sitemaps named in an index are followed, and gzipped sitemaps are read.
  • The URLs inside. Listed URLs are visited, redirects are followed, and anything whose final response is not a 2xx is reported, with the URL and the response it gave.
  • Run limits. One run visits up to 5,000 listed URLs, follows up to 50 child sitemaps from an index, and spends at most 20 minutes visiting URLs. A sitemap listing more than 50,000 URLs is reported as exceeding the protocol's own ceiling. Past those limits the remaining URLs are simply not visited in that run, and the next run starts again from the top rather than resuming.
  • Splitting a big catalog. If you publish tens of thousands of URLs, expose separate top-level product, blog and marketing sitemaps and monitor each one, rather than nesting sitemap indexes.
  • What it does not do. It does not generate a sitemap, read robots.txt, tell you who edited the file, or keep a changelog of pages added and removed.

Want all the technical details?

Sitemap monitoring

Before the first check

Questions about sitemap monitoring.

What Oh Dear reads, how the URLs are checked, and where the sitemap check ends.

What is sitemap monitoring?

It is a daily check that the sitemap you publish is reachable and well-formed. Oh Dear then visits the URLs it lists, follows any redirects, and reports the ones that do not end on a successful response.

Why should I monitor my sitemap?

Because it is the list of pages you give to search engines, and it breaks quietly. The file stops loading, the XML goes invalid, or pages it lists start returning 404s, and nothing tells you. Crawlers just index less, usually weeks before anyone notices the ranking slip.

Does it support sitemap indexes and gzipped sitemaps?

Yes. Oh Dear follows the child sitemaps named in an index, and reads gzipped sitemaps. The default location is /sitemap.xml, and you can point the check at a different URL per site.

How is this different from uptime monitoring?

Website uptime monitoring checks one public URL every minute. Sitemap monitoring runs daily and checks the sitemap file plus the URLs inside it. A healthy homepage does not prove a healthy sitemap.

How is this different from broken page detection?

Broken page and mixed content detection crawls your site by following links. Sitemap monitoring reads the list you publish instead, so it catches a URL that is in the sitemap but linked from nowhere.

Does it generate a sitemap or track every edit?

No. Oh Dear reads the sitemap you already publish. It does not generate XML, identify who changed it, read robots.txt, or keep a changelog of added and removed pages.

What happens when a sitemap is very large?

You get a partial result rather than a failure. One run visits up to 5,000 URLs and spends at most 20 minutes doing it, so the URLs that fit are reported as normal and the rest are left for a later run, which starts again from the top.

Can agencies route each client's alert separately?

Yes. Notifications are configured per site, so the sitemap error on one client site can go to the developer who owns it without alerting everyone else.

See all other FAQ items
Technical detail Read the sitemap monitoring documentation A different check Broken page and mixed content detection

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Capterra
4.9 (73) G2
4.7 (33)
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