ATLAS — how it works

ATLAS draws the floor plan of a site's sitemap estate. Give it a site address or a sitemap URL and it reads robots.txt, follows the sitemap index, and walks out to every child sitemap it finds.

What you get back is the shape of the invitation: which sitemaps exist, how they nest, and how many URLs each one declares.

This is the honest bit. A sitemap is an invitation, not a result. ATLAS reports what a site declares — it never claims anything about what Google has actually indexed, and it never invents an indexation count.

ATLAS also does not visit the pages themselves. That is LOCRA's job.

1. 01Read robots.txt and collect every Sitemap: line.
2. 02If there are none, try the usual locations: /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml.
3. 03Detect whether each file is an index or a urlset.
4. 04Follow index children; count the URLs in each urlset and keep up to 20 samples.

Caps keep a run honest and quick: depth 4, 80 sitemaps fetched, 50,000 declared URLs counted. When a cap is hit, the run says so rather than pretending the map is complete.

• Visual view — each pile is a sitemap, sized by the URLs declared at or below it.
• Table view — the same estate as a calm operator list: URL, type, parent, count, status.
• Flags — fetch fail, empty, index empty and invalid are labelled where they happen.
• Export CSV — sitemap_url, type, parent, loc_count, status.

Click a pile and you get its detail: URL, type, count, fetch status and up to 20 sample URLs. From there, Open in LOCRA hands that sitemap straight to the live checker, prefilled.

Map the estate first, then check the piles that matter. Floor plan, then survey.

ATLAS isn't a standalone tool — it's one mode inside the GSC Companion at /tools/seo. The same email magic-link opens every mode, so you can move from ATLAS to another check without signing in again.

If you want the wider picture first, read GSC Companion — how it works.