Sitemap Monitoring
Cassian Sentinel™ takes daily snapshots of your sitemap and tells you exactly what changed — new pages, modified URLs, and removed content.
Cassian Sentinel™ monitors your store's XML sitemap every day, taking a snapshot of all discoverable URLs and comparing it against the previous day's snapshot. When pages are added, modified, or removed, you'll know about it — without having to check manually.
This is useful for catching unintended changes: a developer accidentally unpublishing a collection page, a bulk product import creating duplicate URLs, or a theme update breaking your sitemap structure.
What Cassian monitors
Sitemap discovery — Cassian checks your /sitemap.xml and any Sitemap: directives in your robots.txt file. If your store uses sitemap indexes (a sitemap of sitemaps), Cassian follows nested indexes up to two levels below the root, reading up to 50 child sitemaps per index within a 200 MB download budget per check.
Daily snapshots — Every day at 5 AM UTC, Cassian records the list of URLs in your sitemap, up to your plan's URL cap. A fresh snapshot also runs after every scan to keep results current.
URL diffing — Each snapshot is compared against the previous one. Cassian reports:
| Change type | What it means |
|---|---|
| New URLs | Pages that appeared in the sitemap since the last check. Could be new products, new collections, or new blog posts. |
| Modified URLs | Pages present in both snapshots whose <lastmod> timestamp changed. Indicates content was updated. A URL gaining or losing its <lastmod> tag isn't counted as modified. |
| Removed URLs | Pages that were in the previous snapshot but are now absent. Could be intentional (product discontinued) or accidental (page unpublished by mistake). |
Mass removal alerts
Routine changes are informational — but a large chunk of your sitemap disappearing usually means something went wrong, so it opens an incident and sends a notification. On the default (normal) sensitivity, an alert fires when either:
- more than 50 URLs or more than 20% of the previous snapshot were removed in a single check, or
- 80% or more of the sitemap disappeared (for sitemaps with at least 10 known URLs — this catches the catastrophic case on smaller stores where the thresholds above would never trip).
You receive one notification per incident, not one per check. The thresholds scale with the site's sensitivity preset (relaxed requires a larger removal before firing; sensitive fires sooner), configurable in the Alerts section of Settings. During quiet hours, sitemap alerts are held until the window ends, and acknowledged or snoozed incidents don't re-notify — see Alerts & notifications.
Where to see sitemap data
Sidebar → Sitemap shows the full sitemap monitoring dashboard:
- Total URLs currently in your sitemap
- New, modified, and removed URLs since the last check
- Date and time of the most recent sitemap check
- A list of changed URLs with their change type
Main dashboard → Sitemap card shows a compact summary with your total URL count and the date of the last check.
How to enable Sitemap Monitoring
Go to Sites in the sidebar and select your store.
Click Setup (or Settings).
Toggle Sitemap Monitoring to ON.
The first sitemap check runs within 24 hours, or after your next scan.
Availability
Sitemap Monitoring is available on all plans at no extra cost. The tier difference is how many URLs each snapshot captures:
| Plan | URLs per snapshot |
|---|---|
| Inspector | 5,000 |
| Analyst | 10,000 |
| Protector | 25,000 |
| Guardian | 50,000 |
| Prime | 100,000 |
| Enterprise | 100,000 |
Check frequency
| Trigger | When it runs |
|---|---|
| Scheduled | Daily at 5 AM UTC |
| Post-scan | After every completed scan |
A 12-hour dedup window prevents redundant checks — if a scheduled check ran at 5 AM and a scan completes at 10 AM, Cassian won't re-check the sitemap unnecessarily.
Does it affect my Cassian Score?
No. Sitemap Monitoring does not contribute to or deduct from your Cassian Score™ — day-to-day changes are informational, and even a mass-removal alert affects only your notifications, not the score. The Technical Health layer separately checks that your sitemap exists and is valid XML — sitemap monitoring tracks changes over time, which is a different concern.
Frequently asked questions
My store's sitemap has thousands of URLs — is that a problem? No. Each snapshot captures up to your plan's URL cap (5,000 on Inspector up to 100,000 on Prime and Enterprise). Stores larger than the cap are monitored up to that limit.
What if my store doesn't have a sitemap?
Cassian will report that no sitemap was found. Most Shopify stores have an automatically generated sitemap at /sitemap.xml. If yours is missing, check that you haven't blocked it in your theme's robots.txt.liquid template.
Can I see historical snapshots? The Sitemap page shows the most recent check and the diff against the previous check. Check records are retained for 90 days, but only the latest snapshot stores the full URL list — older records keep the counts and change summaries, with change lists capped at 500 entries each.
I see "removed URLs" but I didn't delete anything — why? Common causes: a product was set to draft status (removing it from the sitemap), a collection was hidden, or a blog post was unpublished. Check the listed URLs against your platform's admin to see what changed.
How does this differ from the sitemap check in Technical Health? The Technical Health sitemap check validates that your sitemap exists, is valid XML, and contains your key page types. Sitemap Monitoring tracks changes day-over-day — it's about what's different, not whether the sitemap is structurally correct.