Question 1

What is a sitemap analyzer?

Accepted Answer

A sitemap analyzer parses a website's XML sitemap (the file at /sitemap.xml or declared in robots.txt) and turns it into a sortable, filterable list of every URL on the site, along with lastmod dates, priority scores, and changefreq hints. SEOs and content marketers use it for competitor research, content gap analysis, indexation audits, and migration planning. Unlike a deep audit tool that scores one URL, a sitemap analyzer gives you breadth — a complete map of a site's public structure in seconds.

Question 2

How is this different from a full SEO audit?

Accepted Answer

A full audit (try our Website SEO Checker) goes deep on one URL: 43+ checks across meta, content, technical, performance, AI readiness, and authority — slow, comprehensive, single-page. A sitemap analyzer goes wide: it shows every URL on a site at once, lets you scan lastmod dates to see publishing cadence, and only fetches per-page metadata when you click Extract on a specific row. Use the analyzer for reconnaissance and content gap research; use the audit for fixing problems on a specific page.

Question 3

How does it find a site's sitemap?

Accepted Answer

It uses the discovery order most search engines follow. First, it fetches /robots.txt and reads any Sitemap: directives — RFC 9309 makes this directive global, so multiple sitemaps may be declared. If robots.txt has none (or is missing), it falls back to /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml at the site's root. When the discovered file is a sitemap-index, it expands the index one level deep, fetching up to 50 child sitemaps. Each fetch is reported in the Discovery panel with its status and entry count.

Question 4

Does it support gzipped sitemaps?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The sitemap protocol allows gzip-compressed sitemaps (typically named sitemap.xml.gz) and large sites use them to stay under the 50 MB / 50,000 URL per-file ceiling. The analyzer detects gzip via either the URL extension or the Content-Type header, decompresses up to 10 MB of payload, strips the UTF-8 BOM if present, and parses the XML. Zip-bomb defenses cap decompressed size to prevent abuse.

Question 5

What metadata does the per-row extract pull?

Accepted Answer

When you click Extract on a row, the server fetches that URL and returns: HTTP status, final URL after redirects, redirect chain count, response time, content-type and charset, document title, meta description, canonical link, robots meta tag, X-Robots-Tag response header, language, H1 text, H1/H2/H3 counts, word count of visible text, og:title / og:description / og:image, and twitter:title / twitter:description / twitter:image. All in one round trip. Extraction is on-demand only — clicking Extract is the only thing that fetches the page.

Question 6

What are the limits and rate limits?

Accepted Answer

The analyzer collects up to 10,000 URLs per run (sitemaps with more URLs are clearly flagged as truncated). Up to 50 sitemap files are fetched per run, with sitemap-index recursion capped at 2 levels. Per-IP rate limits: 5 sitemap analyses per minute, 20 per-page metadata extractions per minute. Per-page extraction is also gated to hosts you've analyzed in the last 5 minutes — this prevents the endpoint from being used as a generic web crawl proxy.

Question 7

Is this tool free? Does it store my searches?

Accepted Answer

Yes, free and no signup. The tool runs server-side because of CORS, but nothing about your queries is stored — no database, no logs persisted beyond standard error tracking. Use it for client research, competitor audits, content migrations, or just to get a one-glance overview of any site's structure. For a sitemap you want to publish, use our XML Sitemap Generator instead.

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