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XML sitemap validator
A sitemap fails quietly. Entries a search engine cannot use are dropped without a word, and the file still returns 200, so nothing tells you that half of it went nowhere.
This finds your sitemap, parses it, and lists the entries that will be rejected, with the reason for each.
What gets checked
That it is a sitemap at all. Plenty of sites answer 200 for /sitemap.xml with their home page or a soft 404. A crawler reads that as no sitemap, and so does this.
Every entry. Absolute http or https URL, present <loc>, no stray whitespace, same hostname as the sitemap, and a lastmod in W3C date format if there is one.
Duplicates. The same URL listed twice wastes nothing much, and usually means two generators are both writing the file.
The limits. 50,000 entries, 50 MB uncompressed.
The content type. XML sitemaps should be served as application/xml or text/xml.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/pricing</loc>
<lastmod>2026-09-01</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>lastmod is worth getting right or leaving out
Google has said it uses lastmod when it is consistently accurate and ignores it when it is not. A generator that stamps today on every URL every night teaches the crawler that your dates mean nothing, and then a genuinely updated page has no way to say so.
Use the date the content actually changed. If your system cannot tell, leave lastmod out; the sitemap still does its job of listing what exists.
A valid sitemap is not a crawled sitemap
This validator reads the file. It does not fetch the URLs inside it, so a sitemap can pass here and still be full of pages that redirect, 404, or carry a noindex.
Checking that needs a crawl of the site and a comparison of the two lists. The Site Spider does exactly that: it reports crawled pages missing from your sitemap and sitemap URLs that are broken, redirect or are excluded from the index.
Questions people ask
- How do I check my XML sitemap?
- Enter your domain and the validator finds the sitemap the way a crawler does: the address declared in robots.txt first, then /sitemap.xml and the usual variants. Paste the full address instead if yours lives somewhere unusual.
- What makes a sitemap entry invalid?
- Four things account for nearly all of them: a relative URL instead of an absolute one, a URL on a different hostname from the sitemap, a missing
<loc>, and a lastmod that is not a W3C date. Search engines drop those entries silently, so a sitemap can look fine and deliver nothing. - What are the sitemap limits?
- Fifty thousand URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. Past either, split into several sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index, which can itself hold 50,000 sitemaps. Gzip is allowed and the uncompressed size is what counts.
- Should every page be in the sitemap?
- Every page you want indexed, and nothing else. A sitemap full of noindex pages, redirects and 404s teaches a crawler to trust it less. Pages that are canonical to something else do not belong there either.
Other free tools here
- Redirect chain checker — Follow a URL hop by hop and show every redirect between the address you typed and the page that answers.
- Hreflang checker — Read the hreflang annotations on a page and check the language codes, the self-reference and x-default.
- Title and meta description length checker — Measure a page’s title and meta description in characters and in pixels, and say what a result will show.
- All the free tools — one page each, no account on any of them.
- Download a whole crawl as SQLite — when one page is not enough and you want the data itself.