A

Discovery

LOW

Sitemap respects 50 MiB / 50,000-URL caps per document

No fetched sitemap document exceeds 50 MiB or 50,000 URLs. Over-cap sitemaps are silently dropped — neither byte overflow nor entry overflow surfaces a crawler error.

What this check looks for

sitemaps.org caps each individual sitemap document at 50 MiB uncompressed and 50,000 URLs. Over-cap documents must be split into a sitemap index. We check both numbers for every resolved sitemap resource and report any breach with the actual size / count.

Which AI surfaces it affects

  • Google AI Mode (UCP)60
  • Microsoft Copilot50
  • ChatGPT (ACP)30
  • Perplexity30
  • Meta AI30

Weighted against the live specs — ACP 2026-04-17, UCP 2026-04-08.

How to fix it

Split over-cap sitemaps into a sitemap index

Shopify

Developer
  1. Shopify auto-splits sitemaps by section and never exceeds the caps. If failing on Shopify, you're auditing a custom-proxy response — fix the proxy.

BigCommerce

Developer
  1. BigCommerce's `/xmlsitemap.php` paginates automatically. If failing, a CDN/edge worker is concatenating responses — inspect it.

WooCommerce

A few minutes
  1. Yoast / Rank Math both split at 1,000 URLs by default. If failing, your plugin is misconfigured — bump the per-page cap down or check for a custom sitemap generator.

Custom / headless

Developer
  1. Paginate the sitemap and emit a sitemap index referencing each page.
// Emit a sitemap index when over 50,000 URLs
const PER_PAGE = 40_000;
for (let i = 0; i < products.length; i += PER_PAGE) {
  writeSitemap(`/sitemap_products_${i / PER_PAGE + 1}.xml`, products.slice(i, i + PER_PAGE));
}
writeSitemapIndex('/sitemap.xml', allPageUrls);

The spec it's pinned to

  • sitemaps.org — Sitemap size limits

    The sitemaps.org protocol caps each sitemap document at 50 MiB uncompressed and 50,000 URLs. Over-cap documents must be split into a sitemap index.

sitemaps.org protocol

Does your store pass this check?

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