Sitemap checker & 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 tool checks once.Sitemap Monitoring keeps checking.
It checks on a schedule and alerts you the moment the result changes, so you never have to remember to run this again. Ask Theo, the AI assistant in the app, and it explains any finding in plain words.
The same check on every page you visit
In the free VitalSentinel SEO Extension for Chrome, one click shows the sitemaps robots.txt declares, with their status and URL count, for the page you have open.
- Free
- No account needed
- One click
Find a website's sitemap
Enter just the domain. We read the Sitemap: lines in its robots.txt and check the first one, or try /sitemap.xml when robots.txt names none.
What 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 limit, says when a file is too large for it to read in full, 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 uses the date only if it is consistently and verifiably accurate, for example against when the page last changed. 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 Google Search Console show what it actually did.
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