XML sitemap validator

How to use it

1. 1Enter the address you want to checkType or paste it into the field marked "Address to check", including the https:// at the front. Paste the sitemap URL itself if you know it, or any page on the site and we will look for it.
2. 2Press Check and wait a few secondsThe request runs from our server rather than from your browser, so your cache, your extensions and your login session cannot affect the answer. That is the point of it: you are seeing what an anonymous visitor sees.
3. 3Check the format before the contentsA sitemap that is not well-formed XML is not read at all, so a parsing error makes everything below it irrelevant until it is fixed.
4. 4Watch the two limitsA sitemap holds at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Past either, split it and use a sitemap index — the tool follows index children and reports them too.
5. 5Take malformed entries seriouslyRelative URLs, addresses on another domain, and invented lastmod dates all reduce how much the file is trusted. A date stamped on every URL because a plugin does it is worse than no date at all.
6. 6Share or keep the result within 24 hoursThe result has its own link you can send to whoever needs to act on it. It is deleted 24 hours after the check ran, so save anything you need to keep — and re-run the check after a change rather than trusting an old link.

About this tool

This tool validates an XML sitemap: whether it parses, what it declares, how close it sits to the protocol's hard limits, and which of its entries are malformed. Give it a sitemap address or just a site — it will look in robots.txt first and then at the conventional path.

Most sitemap problems are not subtle. They are files that do not parse, files listing addresses on the wrong host, and files a crawler cannot find because nothing points at them.

Understanding the result

How the sitemap was found is reported explicitly. "Your robots.txt told us where it is" and "we guessed /sitemap.xml" are different findings, and the second means a crawler may be guessing too.

Problems are split into those that stop the file working and those worth knowing. A crawler gets nothing at all from the first group.

The 50,000-URL and 50 MB ceilings are rejection thresholds, not trimming thresholds. A file over either is discarded whole.

For a sitemap index we open the first few children to confirm they exist. Ones we did not open are marked "not checked" — which is not the same as failed.

Example

https://example.com/

Found via a Sitemap: line in robots.txt
Valid sitemap · 889 URLs (881 unique)
8 URLs appear more than once
lastmod on 889 · changefreq and priority ignored by Google

Limitations

• We fetch a bounded number of child sitemaps, so a large index is sampled rather than fully walked. A full crawl belongs to the site crawler, which is a later phase.
• We do not check whether the listed URLs themselves resolve, are indexable, or agree with their canonical tags. That is a crawl, not a validation.
• changefreq and priority are validated for correctness, but Google ignores both entirely. Invalid values there cost nothing in practice and we say so.
• Image, video and news sitemap extensions are not validated beyond the core elements.

Questions