When your Shopify sitemap is missing
Shopify builds this for you and keeps it current. You do not create it and you cannot edit it, so a missing one is a symptom of something upstream rather than a task in its own right.
Across 10,110 Shopify storefronts we have scanned, 2% fall short on an XML sitemap.
Or read it off your own store. The scan fetches your storefront the way a crawler does and answers this question and seven others about it.
Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.
Check it directly
Open yourstore.com/sitemap.xml. You should get an index
pointing at sitemap_products_1.xml and its siblings. If that loads, the
sitemap is fine, and any tool saying otherwise could not reach your store —
which is itself the finding worth chasing.
What actually causes it
- The store is password-protected. Pre-launch stores return the password page for everything, sitemap included. Nothing is wrong; nothing is visible either.
- The scan reached a different domain than your storefront. A misconfigured redirect, or a domain pointed somewhere that is not Shopify.
- A robots.txt customisation disallowed it. Rare, and it happens
when someone replaces
{{ robots }}rather than adding to it — see the robots.txt page. - A firewall or bot-protection app refused the request. Common on stores that added one recently.
Only the last two are things to fix. The first is a decision you already made.
If this one passes, this is the one that does not
The answer on this page is that yours is almost certainly fine, and that is true of 98% of the stores we have scanned. Worth saying what is not fine, because it is the same question with a different answer — can an assistant read your store well enough to recommend it:
80% fall short on product structured data, and 18% have none of it at all. That is the one to check. What it is and how to fix it, or run the scan below and it will tell you which of the eight apply to your store.
Checking your own store
The scan below reads your storefront the way a crawler does and reports this check along with the rest. It is free and needs no account.
Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.
The other checks
- Product structured data on Shopify
- Allowing AI shopping crawlers on Shopify
- When your product page needs JavaScript to read
- llms.txt on Shopify
- What your agent endpoint serves
- Page titles and descriptions on Shopify
- When your homepage is a JavaScript redirect
Installs on any Shopify store. The free plan needs no card, and the dashboard runs on sample data if you would rather look first.