How many websites pass the Sitemap Url Hygiene check?
Based on 741 audited sites · Updated 2026-08-13
At a Glance
95% confidence interval: 67.8%–74.3%
Current cross-sectional baseline. Historical snapshots remain stored but are not presented as performance change.
About This Check
Checks directly declared sitemap URLs for parse errors, normalized duplicates, origin conflicts, and mixed protocols without fetching those pages.
What To Do Next
28.9% of audited sites need attention on sitemap url hygiene (214 of 741 sites are warning or failing).
- Prioritize sitemap url hygiene on templates that create many URLs, because one template fix can improve a large share of site architecture & coverage.
- After changing the page, re-run the audit and compare the observed value for this check instead of relying on visual inspection alone.
- Use the 71.1% pass rate as a benchmark: if your site fails here, passing the check moves it closer to the majority of crawlable, AI-readable pages.
Industry Breakdown
How different industries perform on this check.
76.1% of audited Media & Entertainment sites pass this check (n=117), compared with 69.4% of Gaming sites (n=36).
| Industry | Pass rate | Avg score | Evaluated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media & Entertainment | 76.1% | 71.2 | n=117/518 |
| Finance & Banking | 71.8% | 73 | n=39/97 |
| Education | 71.4% | 75.6 | n=63/199 |
| Technology | 70.9% | 70.7 | n=213/880 |
| SaaS & Cloud | 70.6% | 77 | n=102/323 |
| Gaming | 69.4% | 67.7 | n=36/123 |
| Professional Services | 100% | 77.2 | n=3/18limited |
| Healthcare | 92.3% | 74.5 | n=13/46limited |
| Other | 85.7% | 70.5 | n=21/73limited |
| Food & Beverage | 83.3% | 72.9 | n=6/20limited |
n is sites evaluated for this check / audited sites in that industry. Informational or inapplicable results are not counted.
Related Checks
Run a free audit to see whether your site passes this check, or browse the leaderboard and the audited-sites directory.
Key Insight
The largest gaps are content metadata and trust signals: only 7% to 11% of sites include visible or structured dates, testimonials or case studies, and cleanly organized rendered DOMs. In this baseline, core security and server configuration checks are universally met, while page-level content quality and machine-readable publishing signals are much less consistent.