This was a Talking Web newsletter on 7 July 2026 - join the newsletter here.

Hi,

  • An oldie but a goodie to check
  • An easy way to make sure it works
  • Your invitation for next week

Hope you had a lovely weekend? I was camping – with 0% chance of rain. BUT guess what? It rained. ☔ Why do the BBC say 0% chance on their weather forecasts – why don’t they just say 1% so they’re not 100% wrong?! Anyway, it was still lovely (apart from the ticks 🕷️).

This week’s thing to check, is (a) do you have a sitemap? And (b) does it do everything it should?

A few weeks ago, Tom blogged about the renewed importance of site maps, because of how AI crawlers use them a lot.

So your task this week is to check you’ve got one – it’s often at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml if it’s a Yoast generated one on WordPress.

(And if you don’t have one, sense check that the important pages of your site are well linked / easy to crawl)

Assuming you’ve got one, for brownie points, work through Tom’s check list to see if it actually works and does what it’s supposed to.

Mainly:

  1. Does it actually load when you visit it?
  2. Has it got URLs in it when you visit it? (I know that sounds beyond silly but it does happen, that a site map is empty because something went wrong when it was generating.)
  3. Are your important pages included?
  4. Do the URLs in the site map all work when you visit them?
  5. Are all the URLs using https?
  6. Are they all from your domain?
  7. Are there any duplicate URLs? (Strip out duplicates – there’s no point)
  8. Is it in your robots.txt file? (Using the Sitemap: directive)
  9. Is the lastmod data accurate?

Whilst he was in the zone of site maps, Tom also added some site map checks to SiteVitals.co.uk so if you’ve got an account, you can check these tick list items in there, and if not, run a free report here and look in the AI Visibility Score section.

That’s it for this week folks – but OH! If you haven’t already signed up to my series of webinars about the Agentic Web, you can do so here ahead of the next one on Thursday 16th July at 11am GMT about getting your website ready to be used by AI.

👉 Is your website usable by AI?​

Speak soon,

Lisa

Lisa Freeman

​18a web development​

​https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisafreemanweb