Most websites place their XML sitemap at the root domain with standard naming: yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml. Try those URLs first in your browser. If you get a 404, check the robots.txt file at yoursite.com/robots.txt, which typically declares the sitemap location with a line like "Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml". For sites you own, Google Search Console shows exactly which sitemaps have been submitted under the Index > Sitemaps section. This tells you both the URL and whether Google successfully crawled it. Bing Webmaster Tools offers the same under Sitemaps. If you're auditing a competitor or third-party site, browser extensions like "SEO Minion" or "Redirect Path" can auto-detect sitemaps, though manually checking robots.txt is just as fast. Some CMS platforms use non-standard paths. WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math typically generates sitemaps at /sitemap_index.xml or /sitemap.xml. Shopify uses /sitemap.xml but often breaks it into multiple files like /sitemap_products_1.xml. Wix and Squarespace auto-generate sitemaps but don't always list them in robots.txt, so you may need to dig through their support docs or use their built-in SEO tools to locate the URL. At Ottawa SEO, when we onboard a new client site, we verify the sitemap in three places: direct URL test, robots.txt declaration, and Search Console submission status. We've seen cases where a sitemap exists but isn't referenced in robots.txt or submitted to Google, which means crawlers might miss it entirely. If you can't find a sitemap at all, the site either doesn't have one (common on older or neglected sites) or it's dynamically generated and requires a plugin or server-side script to activate. For large sites managing 500+ domains like our portfolio, we script sitemap checks using tools like Screaming Frog or custom Python scripts that fetch robots.txt and test common sitemap paths across the entire list. If you're doing this manually for one site, start with /sitemap.xml, then robots.txt, then Search Console.