Keyword suggestions from your sitemap

You don't have to think up new keywords yourself. Rankion reads your domain's sitemap, works out what each page is about, and turns that into keyword suggestions with real search volume. This guide shows you how the sitemap scan works, when it runs, what it costs, and how to use the suggestions.

What does the sitemap scan do?

Rankion finds your domain's sitemap — via robots.txt, /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml, even if it's made up of several partial sitemaps — and reads up to 1,000 pages from it. For each page, an AI recognizes 1 to 5 topic keywords, and for each of those Rankion fetches the monthly search volume. Only keywords with at least 50 searches per month are shown as suggestions; anything below that is dropped. Suggestions that were already found before are not added twice.

Where do you find the suggestions?

Open your project and click "Keyword suggestions". The page is called "Keyword suggestions from sitemap". At the top, the header shows how many pages were scanned and how many keywords that produced ("N pages scanned – M keywords suggested"), plus the date of the last scan ("last: …").

When does the scan run?

A sitemap scan starts in three ways:

1. When you set up a tracking project. As soon as you move from step 2 to step 3 in the setup wizard, Rankion starts the scan on its own — at most once per domain.
2. By hand, whenever you like. On the "Keyword suggestions" page, click "Start sitemap scan" at the top.
3. Automatically every week. Every Monday at 2 a.m., Rankion checks the sitemap of every active project again. If the project already had a paid scan in the last 6 days — for example because you set it up in the wizard on Sunday — the Monday run is skipped, so you don't pay twice.

What does a scan cost?

A scan costs 5 credits, and only if a sitemap was actually found — if Rankion finds none, nothing is charged. The suggestions themselves and adding them to tracking cost nothing extra. Credits are only charged for the ongoing tracking of the questions this creates, per run, as described in AI visibility tracking.

While the scan is running

While Rankion is still waiting for a free worker, the page shows:

"Sitemap scan is waiting for a free worker — it starts automatically, you can leave this page."

Once the scan is already running, it shows:

"Sitemap scan running … suggestions will appear automatically, you can leave this page."

You don't have to wait. Once all pages have been read, the suggestions appear on their own — you can leave the page in the meantime and come back later.

The suggestions table

Each row of the table shows:

• Keyword — the suggested search term.
• Volume — the monthly search volume, sortable.
• Source — the page the topic was found on.
• Status — "Not tracked" or "In tracking".
• Action — the button to add it.

Above the table you'll find a search field ("Keyword or source page"), a setting for how many rows to show per page, and — if your website has several language versions — a "Language version" filter.

Adding suggestions to tracking

Click "Add to tracking" on a row, and Rankion adds the keyword as the question "What is <keyword>?" to AI tracking. From the next run on, this question is asked to every AI system in your project, and the results appear under Monitoring.

If you want to add several suggestions at once, tick the boxes in the first column and then click "Add selection to tracking". Keywords that are already in tracking are not added twice.

If you change your project's domain

If you change the domain in the wizard or in the project settings, the suggestions for the old domain aren't deleted, just hidden. If you switch back to the old domain later, they're there again.

"The domain was changed and no sitemap scan has run for <domain> yet. Click »Start sitemap scan« above."

If the domain change happens through the setup wizard, the scan for the new domain starts automatically as soon as you move on to step 3.

If something doesn't work

"No sitemap found." Publish a sitemap at /sitemap.xml, or add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt, then start the scan again. Since no sitemap was found, you weren't charged for it.

"The sitemap scan failed. Please try again." Just try again. If your server or firewall blocks automated requests, the scan may not be able to reach your pages — Rankion's crawler identifies itself and publishes its IP addresses at https://rankion.ai/bot, so you can allow it specifically.

0 suggestions after a scan. This usually means that none of the topics found reaches at least 50 searches per month.

API reference

The interface uses these three endpoints — you can also use them directly:

• POST /api/v1/tracking-projects/{id}/sitemap-scan — starts the scan, returns 202
• GET /api/v1/tracking-projects/{id}/sitemap-pages — the scanned pages
• GET /api/v1/tracking-projects/{id}/keyword-suggestions — the keyword suggestions

You can also ask the chat assistant: "Find me new keywords from my sitemap for project 42."