How to Install siteprobe: Check Every Page in Your Sitemap in One Command (Free)

Your sitemap is basically a menu you hand to Google. "Here are all my pages. Enjoy."

Now imagine half the dishes on that menu are sold out, three moved to a different restaurant, and one takes 40 minutes to arrive.

That's a lot of sitemaps. Nobody checks. Today you will, in one command, for free, with a tool called siteprobe.

Quick words (one line each):

• Sitemap: a file (usually yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) that lists the pages you want search engines to find.

• Status code: the number a server sends back. 200 = fine, 301/308 = moved, 404 = missing, 500 = broken.

• Redirect: an automatic jump from one address to another.

• Terminal: the text window where you type commands instead of clicking.

• Exit code: a number a program leaves behind when it finishes, so other tools know if it went well.

Why this matters

Google's Search Central team (Oct 1, 2026) said a sitemap should list only the clean, main version of each page, no tracking tags, no date stamps (0:09:40-0:11:00). Being in the sitemap nudges Google to pick that address as the main one.

So every address in there needs to actually work. siteprobe visits all of them and tells you which ones don't.

Step 1: Do a 60-second safety check

Never install a GitHub tool blind. Here's what siteprobe looked like when we checked it on Oct 30, 2026:

1. Licence: MIT. Free to use, including for client work.

2. Last update: Sep 30, 2026 (release v1.5.1). 102 commits since March 2025, with regular releases.

3. Stars: 7 (as of Oct 30, 2026). Small, but steadily maintained.

4. No tracking. We read the source: the only web addresses in the code are chart namespaces.

5. No account, no API key, no paid parts.

Step 2: Install it

siteprobe is a small, fast program. Pick the install route that matches what you already have:

1. Have Python? Run pipx install siteprobe.

2. Just want to try it once? Run uvx siteprobe https://example.com/sitemap.xml.

3. Rust user? Run cargo install siteprobe. Mac users also get a Homebrew option in the README.

Check it worked:

siteprobe --version

Step 3: Run it on your sitemap

siteprobe https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Swap in your own address. siteprobe reads the sitemap, follows sitemap index files (sitemaps inside sitemaps, even zipped .gz ones), and visits every page.

Gotcha we hit in testing: if your sitemap lives on www but the site redirects to the bare domain (or the other way round), siteprobe stops with an error. Use the address your site really lands on, or add --follow-redirects.

Step 4: Save a report you can actually read

Terminal output is fine for nerds. For everyone else:

siteprobe https://example.com/sitemap.xml --report-path-html report.html --report-path report.csv

Open report.html in your browser for a visual report. Open report.csv in Excel or Google Sheets and sort by status code. Anything that isn't 200 goes on your fix list.

Step 5: Find the slow pages

Add a slow threshold in seconds:

siteprobe https://example.com/sitemap.xml --slow-threshold 2

Every page that takes longer than 2 seconds to answer gets flagged. Slow pages are where visitors bail.

Step 6: Go easy on small hosting

By default siteprobe asks for 4 pages at once. Cheap hosting hates being rushed. Slow it down:

siteprobe https://example.com/sitemap.xml --concurrency-limit 2 --rate-limit 60/1m

That's 2 at a time, 60 pages a minute max. Polite. Your host will thank you.

Step 7: Fix what it found

1. 404 or 410 (missing): take that address out of the sitemap. A dead page doesn't belong on the menu.

2. 301/308 (redirect): replace it with the final address. Google wants the clean, main URL in the sitemap (0:09:40-0:11:00).

3. 500 (server error): that page is broken for real people too. Fix it first.

4. Junk pages in the list (thank-you pages, test pages, /404): remove them. siteprobe checks status, not whether a page belongs there, so eyeball the list too.

What we found when we ran it

On Oct 30, 2026 we ran siteprobe on two live small-business sites. Every page returned 200, which is great. The surprise: one sitemap listed 45 pages with zero "last changed" dates, and the other listed 221 pages with only 3.

Google said in the same video that it mainly reads two things in a sitemap: the address and that last-changed date (0:04:40-0:06:00). siteprobe doesn't check those dates, so open your sitemap and look for <lastmod> yourself. (Our sitemap post below shows what to do about it.)

Step 8: Make it a habit

siteprobe finishes with exit code 0 when every page returns 2xx and 1 when something failed. So it slots straight into an automatic check. Run it:

• Before you launch or hand over a site.

• After you delete, rename or move pages.

• Once a month, with your coffee.

What it costs

Nothing. MIT licence, no keys, no upgrade.

Do this today

1. Run uvx siteprobe https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml --report-path report.csv.

2. Sort the CSV by status code.

3. Remove or replace every address that isn't a 200.

4. Open your sitemap and check for <lastmod> dates.

5. Set a monthly reminder to run it again.

Related reading

• Fix your sitemap: what Google actually reads

• How to install linkinator to find broken links

• Which 404 errors to fix and which to ignore

Sources

• GitHub: bartTC/siteprobe

• Google Search Central (Martin Splitt and John Mueller) - Do sitemaps still matter? (2026-10-01)

Don't worry if this seems like it's a pain in the ass for someone who doesn't build websites. That's because it is. The good news: just click the link below, pull the trigger, and we'll take care of the rest.