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Koval SEO

A sitemap lists no pages

In the reportEmpty sitemap

sitemap_empty · Issue

Short answer

This appears when a sitemap answered 200 and was read, but lists no addresses. An empty sitemap tells search engines nothing about your pages. Add the pages you want found, or remove the declaration of the empty file.

Severity: Medium. Fix it in your next round of site changes; the finding is about the file, not about whether your pages are indexed.

Why it matters

A sitemap is meant to tell search engines which pages and files you consider important, so they can crawl the site more efficiently. An empty one gives them nothing to read.

What to do

  1. Look at the finding: it names every empty sitemap and shows how up to ten of them were declared, with a count of the rest.
  2. If the sitemap should list pages, check the setting in your website editor or SEO plugin that fills it, for example a content type left switched off.
  3. If the file is not needed, remove its Sitemap: line from robots.txt, or its entry in the sitemap index.

What we read

We read the sitemaps your robots.txt declares, the files their indexes list, and, if those give no usable page, common addresses such as /sitemap.xml. A file is empty when it answered 200 and we find no address in it: no <loc> inside a <url> or an index's <sitemap>, no RSS item or Atom entry with a link, or a body that is blank.

Entries are counted before we set aside addresses on other hosts, so a file listing only other sites' pages is not empty. A blank file at a guessed address, such as a /sitemap.xml your site has not declared, is not reported; a declared one is.

Example & evidence

Illustrative example — one declared sitemap, not a live audit.

https://bakery.example/robots.txt declares https://bakery.example/sitemap-news.xml, which answers 200:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
</urlset>

The file is a sitemap with no entries, so the site is reported and the finding names this file.

A possible correction: add the news pages, such as <url><loc>https://bakery.example/news/sourdough-week/</loc></url>, or delete the Sitemap: line.

Confirm & check again

Check for yourself: open the sitemap's address in a browser and look for <loc> entries; Search Console's Sitemaps report shows how many pages Google found in each submitted file.

Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site; it reads every sitemap again. The finding is confirmed fixed only when no file is empty and every sitemap in the audit answers 200, can be read, is within the size limit and was reached within the file and depth limits.

Limits & sources

The check reports the empty file only; it does not judge whether your pages are indexed, or whether the addresses in your other sitemaps are the right ones.

Confidence: High because the file's entries are counted directly.

Sources

  • Google, Build and submit a sitemap — describes a sitemap as a list of page URLs and shows its format. Checked 25 September 2026.
  • Google, Learn about sitemaps — says a sitemap tells search engines which pages and files you consider important. Checked 25 September 2026.

Editorial review: 29 September 2026