<b>Alert on sitemap drift, don't audit it manually</b>

<b>Alert on sitemap drift, don't audit it manually</b>

Sitemaps rot silently — a deploy changes URL structure, the generator keeps emitting old paths, and you find out weeks later in GSC.

Monitoring SOP:
Step 1 — Daily job fetches the live sitemap and records URL count.
Step 2 — Alert if count swings more than 10% day over day (mass-delete or mass-duplicate).
Step 3 — Sample 50 URLs daily; alert if non-200 rate exceeds 2%.
Step 4 — Alert if the sitemap itself returns non-200 or fails XML parse.

Thresholds:
— ✅ URL count stable within ±10% absent a known change.
— ✅ Sampled non-200 rate under 2%.
— ✅ Sitemap parses as valid XML every run.

Definition of done: a scheduled check pages you on count swings, status errors, or parse failures — before GSC does.