Sitemap Audit Claude Skill
This skill audits a website's XML sitemaps and produces an actionable report. It discovers sitemaps from robots.txt, follows sitemap index files, and validates every listed URL to find broken or redirecting URLs, noindexed or robots-blocked URLs, URLs canonicalized to a different page, wrong-host or wrong-protocol URLs, duplicates, oversized sitemaps over 50,000 URLs or 50MB, parse errors, and missing or invalid lastmod, priority, and changefreq values.
Quick Take
Point the skill at a site, robots.txt, or sitemap URL. It discovers and follows every sitemap, probes each listed URL, runs the checks across three severity tiers, and returns a prioritized report with targeted fixes.
What The Skill Checks
- URL indexability: broken (non-200) URLs, redirecting URLs, noindexed or robots-blocked URLs, and URLs canonicalized to a different page, all of which shouldn't appear in a sitemap.
- Structural and consistency problems: wrong-host or wrong-protocol URLs, duplicate URLs, oversized sitemaps over 50,000 URLs or 50MB, and parse errors in the XML itself.
- Metadata quality across entries: missing or invalid lastmod, priority, and changefreq values, with discovery that follows sitemap index files from robots.txt.
How The Skill Is Packaged
The skill follows the standard Claude Agent Skill structure: a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and workflow instructions, a references/ folder with the full audit check definitions and report template, and a scripts/ folder with Python scripts that discover and probe sitemap URLs and audit the inventory. Copy the skill folder into your Claude skills directory and Claude invokes it automatically when a request matches its description.
Skill Files
Every file in the skill is embedded below directly from the Claude-SEO-Skills repository, so you can review exactly what the skill instructs Claude to do before installing it.
SKILL.md
The skill definition: frontmatter, inputs to collect, the five-step workflow, and the resources the skill relies on.
Audit Checks Reference (references/audit-checks.md)
Full definitions, severities, and rationale for every check across the high, medium, and low tiers, from parse failures to metadata quality.
Report Template (references/report-template.md)
The output structure the skill follows, including sitemaps found, URLs probed, and issues grouped into sections.
Sitemap Collector Script (scripts/collect_sitemap.py)
Discovers sitemaps from robots.txt, follows sitemap index files, and probes each listed URL for HTTP status, redirects, canonical tags, noindex signals, and robots.txt blocking.
Sitemap Auditor Script (scripts/audit_sitemap.py)
Runs the audit checks against the collected sitemap inventory and outputs the structured report data classified into high, medium, and low severity tiers.