Field notes. John Arndt, Soxoa. Published .
A business publishes useful answers, adds them to the sitemap, and waits for them to work. Each page loads. Each has a title and description. A visitor starting at the homepage still has no practical way to find the answers.
We encountered that gap in the Soxoa site audit. The saved audit showed 118 sitemap pages returning successful responses, with no missing descriptions or canonicals in the recorded checks. Eleven pages in the problems section were disconnected from the audited internal-link graph. The navigation repair gave that section a path from the homepage through a hub to its ten individual answers.
That experience became the basis for audit-site-discoverability, a Claude skill draft for examining the relationship between a site's page inventory and its navigation. The draft has not yet been behaviorally tested in Claude.
A page inventory needs a visitor path
A sitemap helps enumerate URLs. A link graph answers a different operational question: which pages can someone reach by following the links from the entry points we care about?
The audit starts by collecting those entry points, the sitemap, and the allowed domains. It records redirects, response status, canonical URLs, and indexing directives. It then follows actual links and compares the reachable pages with the inventory.
The distinction matters because a successful response proves that a URL can load. It does not prove the page appears anywhere in the site's useful navigation. Search visibility introduces additional questions that this check alone cannot answer.
Repair the path around the reader's task
Consider an illustrative service website with six guides about late invoices. Every guide sits at a valid URL. The services page discusses administrative automation but links only to a contact form.
A useful repair might add a short explanation and a link to an invoice-workflow hub on the services page. The hub can introduce the problem, explain which guide fits which situation, and link to the six answers. A relevant guide can then connect the reader to the next practical step.
This produces a path someone can understand:
- Administrative automation service
- Next page: Invoice-workflow hub · Reader's reason to follow: Understand the recurring problem
- Invoice-workflow hub
- Next page: Late-approval guide · Reader's reason to follow: Diagnose the specific delay
- Late-approval guide
- Next page: Relevant service or diagnostic · Reader's reason to follow: Decide what to do next
The example is illustrative. Its value comes from matching links to intent. Adding every guide to every footer may improve a graph count while making the site harder to use.
Keep the crawl's limits visible
Some links appear only after JavaScript renders. Some pages redirect to another host. Some URL families expand indefinitely through filters and calendars. A careful audit names its boundaries and explains whether it inspected server HTML, rendered pages, or a supplied export.
It also records what it could not inspect. A blocked request should remain a coverage gap. It should not become a claim that the page is broken or absent.
After a repair, repeat the relevant checks against the public pages. Confirm the new links exist, the destinations resolve, and the intended cluster is reachable. Preserve the earlier result so the improvement can be assessed against the same scope.
Give Claude a bounded audit
Try this request:
“Use audit-site-discoverability on our public homepage and sitemap. Stay within the supplied domain and exclude account and checkout paths. Find useful pages disconnected from the homepage link graph. Recommend a small set of relevant parent or hub links. Report crawl limits and give me a verification checklist. Make no site changes.”
The audit can expose missing paths and prepare a repair plan. It cannot establish that search engines will index the pages, predict rankings, or promise traffic and conversion gains. Those outcomes need their own dated evidence.
Start with the section containing your best answers to customer questions. Check whether a visitor can actually find them from the homepage before commissioning another batch of content.
Get the skill
audit-site-discoverability is part of the free Soxoa Ops plugin for Claude. In Claude Code, add the marketplace with /plugin marketplace add johnarndt/soxoa-claude-plugins, then run /plugin install soxoa-ops@soxoa-plugins. You can read the skill on GitHub before installing it, or copy its folder into ~/.claude/skills/.