XML Sitemap Validator
A broken sitemap fails quietly – search engines skip the file and nothing tells you. Paste your sitemap URL, or just your domain, and this free XML sitemap validator shows you in seconds whether yours can be read, and where the entries in it go wrong.
This checked one URL, once.
VitalSentinel Indexing Monitoring keeps watching this around the clock, so you never have to run the check again. You hear about it the moment something changes.
Free plan, no credit cardWhat it checks
- Finds the sitemap from robots.txt when you enter a bare domain, and unpacks gzipped .xml.gz files
- Checks every file it opens, including each child of an index, against the 50,000 URL and 50MB limits, and flags an index that lists another index
- Checks every last modified date it reads against the date format the standard requires, and flags relative, cross-domain and duplicate URLs
- Flags the mistakes that make a search engine abandon the file: unescaped ampersands, anything printed before the opening XML declaration, and a missing sitemaps.org namespace
What it does not
- It does not open the URLs inside, so it cannot say whether they work or whether they can be indexed
- It reads at most 5 child sitemaps from an index, 1,000 URLs in total, and the first 8MB of each file
- It is not a full XML schema validator. It reports the problems that matter in practice
- When robots.txt lists several sitemaps we check the first one. The rest are named in the result, so you can run them separately
Questions
- What happens if my sitemap has more than 50,000 URLs?
- Nothing on your site breaks, which is why this goes unnoticed: the file is not processed the way you intended, and the only place it surfaces is the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console. Split it into sitemaps of under 50,000 URLs each and list them in a sitemap index. The 50MB limit is measured uncompressed, so gzipping a file that is too large does not help.
- Is a wrong last modified date worse than none at all?
- Yes. Google drops the signal when the dates look generated: identical on every URL, updated every time you publish, or set in the future. An accurate date on the pages that actually changed is worth having. A build timestamp is not.
- Can my sitemap list URLs on another domain?
- Not by default. A sitemap is trusted for URLs on the host that serves it, so entries elsewhere are ignored unless both sites are verified in the same Google Search Console account and you cross-submit deliberately. The version of this most sites have is smaller: a www prefix that does not match the host serving the file, or http:// URLs listed in a sitemap served over https.
- Does a valid sitemap mean my pages will be indexed?
- No. A sitemap tells Google which URLs you consider worth crawling. Google still decides what to crawl and what to index. The Sitemaps and Page Indexing reports in Search Console show what it actually did.
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