Sitemap Analytics & Insights

What is the Sitemap Analytics & Insights?

The Sitemap Analytics & Insights is a free tool that reads a sitemap and shows how its URLs are organised: how many there are, which top-level folders hold them, how deep their paths go, and whether entries carry lastmod, priority and changefreq. It follows a sitemap index into up to 20 of its sitemaps before counting.

How to use the Sitemap Analytics & Insights

1. Enter a sitemap URL, or just the domain to let the tool find the sitemap through robots.txt and the common paths.
2. Press Analyze sitemap. If the file is a sitemap index, the tool reads up to 20 of the sitemaps it lists.
3. Read the overview: total URLs, number of domains, the deepest URL path, and whether lastmod, priority and changefreq appear.
4. Check URL Distribution by Directory for the five top-level folders with the most URLs, and URL Depth Analysis for how many URLs sit at each depth.
5. Work through the recommendations, which flag missing tags, paths deeper than three levels and files over 50,000 URLs.

What can a sitemap tell you about a site's structure?

A sitemap shows what a site is mostly made of. Grouping its URLs by top-level folder turns a flat list into proportions, such as how much sits under /blog/ compared with /products/.

The surprises are usually template pages. Tag, category and paginated archive pages can outnumber the articles they link to, and each one is a URL the site is asking search engines to index.

What is URL depth, and does it affect SEO?

URL depth here is the number of segments in the path. /blog/post has a depth of two, /shop/mens/shoes/running has four, and the homepage is zero.

Path depth is not a ranking factor, and it is not the same as click depth, the number of clicks from the homepage to a page. Treat a deep path as a prompt to check the internal links to those pages, not as a reason to rename URLs.

What do the sitemap recommendations mean?

Each recommendation is a rule applied to the whole file. Act on missing <lastmod> first, because Google uses accurate <lastmod> dates to decide when to re-crawl.

Also check the Domains figure. Anything above one means the sitemap lists URLs on another host, such as a subdomain or the www. version, and search engines ignore those entries unless that host has approved them. To score the file and see every issue listed, run it through the XML Sitemap Validator.

Should I add priority and changefreq because the analyzer says so?

Not for Google. The analyzer recommends <priority> and <changefreq> when a sitemap lacks them, but Google ignores both values, so adding them changes nothing there. Treat those two recommendations as optional and spend the time on accurate <lastmod> dates instead.

The depth recommendation needs reading too. It says some URLs are more than three clicks deep, but what it measures is path segments, as explained above, not clicks from the homepage.

How does the analyzer count URLs from a sitemap index?

It opens up to the first 20 sitemaps the index lists and adds up every <url> entry inside them. A child sitemap that fails to load is skipped without a warning, and an index nested inside the index adds nothing, so a total lower than you expect usually means a sitemap was skipped or sits past the twentieth.

URLs are not de-duplicated, so a page listed in two sitemaps counts twice. An entry whose <loc> is not a valid URL counts in the total but belongs to no directory and no depth. The directory chart shows the five folders with the most URLs, each as a percentage of the total. To see each sitemap's own URL count and status, use the Sitemap Checker.