The audit did not cover the whole sitemap

This finding says nothing about your site. It says how far our audit got, and it exists so that you do not read silence in the report as “everything else is fine”.

It works like this: the audit has two page quotas the crawl may not exceed. When a quota stops the crawl before it reaches the end of your sitemap, we count how many sitemap URLs we did not visit because of it, and that number goes into the report.

Both numbers live in config/thresholds.json#crawler and apply to the paid tier; the free tier uses 12 and 1. A sitemap URL counts as missed-because-of-a-quota when we did not visit it and either the whole budget or its group's quota was already spent.

What the check does not do:

• It does not claim the unvisited URLs are fine. Nor that they are broken. We did not see them; that is the entire content of the finding.
• It does not count URLs left out for any reason other than a quota. A page disallowed in robots.txt or on another domain is not counted here.
• It does not run on a sampled (free) scope. There the sitemap is not compared with the crawl at all, so there is nothing to qualify.
• It does not run when the sitemap is missing, unreadable or empty: that is ACC-06, and that is a fault on the site, not a limit of the audit.
• It does not list which URLs they were. Only how many.

The finding is site-level and informational: it does not affect the score at all (config/scoring.json, the info weight is 0). That is deliberate: the score should measure your site, not the scope you bought from us.

It is not a recommendation, so there is nothing to evidence, and the “effect not documented” class is here because we have no better one, not because we measured an effect and failed to find it. This finding advises you to do nothing and has no bearing on visibility in AI answers in either direction.

What it does have on record is its own reason for existing, and that is worth explaining, because it grew out of a mistake that was ours.

Until 13 September 2026, ACC-06 and SEO-07 reported a mismatch between sitemap and reality even when the mismatch was caused by our own quota. A customer with a blog of more than twenty articles got “the sitemap does not match the pages we found” practically every time, and had no way to fix it, because their site had not caused it. A finding the customer cannot act on is a bad finding.

So both checks now stay quiet about URLs beyond our reach. But staying quiet altogether would distort things the other way: anyone who reads the report and finds no mention of 300 sitemap URLs will conclude those URLs are fine. SCOPE-02 is that missing piece: it says out loud “we did not see this many URLs, so we claim nothing about them”.

It is worth knowing the limit of that distinction, because it is not perfect: we can tell “we never reached this URL” from “we reached it”, but not “we sampled the group and it was fine”. A site with 500 URLs under one prefix, 480 of which return 404, passes this filter; the quota stopped us at the twentieth. Those 480 errors do not vanish quietly, though: that is precisely why this finding exists and states a number. And errors among the twenty we did visit are still reported, unchanged.

There is nothing to fix on your site. This finding calls for no action and there is no point “resolving” it, which is the single most important sentence here, because it reads easily as a complaint.

So what to do with it:

Only if you want the rest checked can you run an audit with a larger scan scope. We put that last on purpose: this is not a manufactured problem with a paid solution. In most cases the right response is none.

And finally the view from the other side, which is often more useful than the number itself: the per-path quota does not stop a site whose content is spread out. It stops one where a single section holds hundreds of URLs. If yours is like that, it is worth asking whether all those pages really belong in the sitemap: a sitemap should list the content you want in search, not everything the server can return.