Does your sitemap point at real pages?
A sitemap full of dead or redirecting URLs wastes the crawl budget you want spent on products. This fetches yours, follows a sitemap index if there is one, and samples the URLs to see what they return.
Reads /sitemap.xml, follows the first child sitemap when it is an index, and samples URLs with real requests. Nothing is stored.
How this check works
Shipwork fetches your /sitemap.xml from outside your network the way Google does, follows the first child sitemap when it is an index, validates the XML, then samples the URLs inside with real requests — reporting dead pages, redirects, and blocks. A sitemap is a hint, not a guarantee: its job is to save the crawler time, and dead entries do the opposite.
Questions
- Where should my sitemap live?
- At the site root (/sitemap.xml), referenced from robots.txt. Shopify serves one automatically — submit that exact URL in Search Console.
- Why does Search Console say “couldn’t fetch” when it loads for me?
- Usually a wrong submitted path, a dead child sitemap inside the index, or bot protection that answers crawlers differently than your browser. Shipwork checks from outside your network.
- Do dead URLs in a sitemap hurt?
- Yes — they waste crawl budget on pages that cannot rank instead of your products.