Sitemap & Liftability

This page covers two related pieces: how Grandranker discovers and uses your XML sitemap, and the Liftability Score. It's a 0-100 score for how likely AI models are to cite a page.

How Grandranker uses your sitemap

Your sitemap tells Grandranker which pages exist on your site. It's used in three places:

• Internal linking: pages from your sitemap become link candidates inside generated articles, so new content links back to your existing pages. See Article Settings.
• Site Audit: the GEO audit checks that a sitemap exists and that your robots.txt points to it.
• Onboarding: Grandranker tries to auto-detect your sitemap and blog URL when you add a website.

Automatic discovery

You usually don't have to configure anything. Grandranker finds your sitemap by:

1. Reading robots.txt and following any Sitemap: directives.
2. Checking common locations like /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, and /wp-sitemap.xml.
3. Validating that the response is a real XML sitemap.

Sitemap index files are followed recursively, and image/video/news sitemaps are skipped. Asset URLs (images, PDFs, scripts) are filtered out so only real pages are used. Discovered pages are cached for 24 hours; the Refresh button in the Internal Linking settings re-fetches immediately.

Setting the sitemap URL manually

If your sitemap lives at a non-standard path, set it yourself:

• During onboarding, step Connect Your Blog: the Sitemap URL field (usually found at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml).
• Later, in Article Settings → Links: the same Sitemap URL field, next to Blog URL.

Liftability Score

The Liftability screen (app.grandranker.com/liftability) scores any URL on how likely AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are to cite it. Paste a URL and click Scan URL, or click Or scan top-cited pages from AI Overview data to score the pages AI engines already cite most in your space.

The 12 LLM-citation factors

Each scan analyzes 12 weighted criteria, each scored 0-10:

Factor	Weight
Answer-first structure	12%
Heading hierarchy	10%
Structured lists	10%
FAQ sections	10%
Schema markup	10%
Table data	8%
Citation-worthy stats	8%
Readability	8%
Content length	7%
Author/expertise signals	7%
Internal linking	5%
Freshness signals	5%

The overall score is the weighted total on a 0-100 scale: 80+ is Excellent, 60+ Good, 40+ Fair, 20+ Poor, and below 20 Very Poor.

Reading the results

• Criteria Breakdown: every factor with its individual score.
• Recommendations: up to five concrete fixes for the weakest factors, tagged High Priority or Improvement. Example: aim for 1,500-5,000 words of comprehensive coverage, or write at a grade 8-12 reading level.
• Your Page vs. Top-Cited: after scanning cited pages, a side-by-side comparison of your page against the pages AI models cite most, with how often each was cited.
• Scan History: previous scans; click any row to reload its results. Re-scanning the same URL overwrites its previous score, so history reflects each page's latest state.

FAQ

What does "liftability" mean?

How easily AI engines can "lift" your content into their answers: cite it, quote it, and reference it. Higher scores mean the page is structured the way AI models prefer to source from.

Why does "scan cited pages" say there's no citation data?

That option scores the third-party pages AI engines cite for your tracked queries. It needs AI Overview monitoring running first. See the AI Visibility overview.

The scan says it failed to fetch my URL. Why?

The page must be publicly reachable. Firewalls, bot protection, or a page that isn't live yet will cause "Failed to fetch the URL. Please check the URL is accessible."

Does Grandranker generate a sitemap for my site?

No. It reads your existing sitemap. If your site has none, most CMS platforms generate one automatically. The GEO Audit will flag a missing sitemap for you.

Questions? Contact us at [email protected].