Free Sitemap Checker

It tells you whether search engines can find your sitemap, whether they can read it, and whether the pages it lists are pages they should index. Each result groups what it found by severity, so problems come first and passes last.

• Where your sitemaps are: the ones robots.txt names and the ones at common addresses.
• Whether the XML parses, and the line and column where it breaks if it does not.
• Whether the root element and namespace are right, and whether the file stays within 50,000 URLs and 50 MB.
• URLs that are relative, not escaped, on another host or listed twice, and lastmod dates that are invalid or in the future.
• For an index: each child sitemap's status, type and URL count.
• For a sample of listed URLs: the status each answers, redirects, redirects to the homepage, and noindex.

The checker sends one honest user agent and no cookies. It reads up to 10 MB of each sitemap, after unzipping a .gz file, and says so when a file is larger, so every count covers exactly what was read.

Enter a domain in the Find tab and the finder looks in the two places search engines look. First it reads robots.txt for Sitemap: lines, which is how a site tells every crawler where its sitemap lives. Then it tries the addresses that site builders and SEO plugins use by default.

Each address found is listed with how it was found, the status it answered and whether it is a sitemap, a sitemap index or a feed. An address that answers 200 with a normal web page is reported as not found (the site returned a web page instead), because that is a soft 404, not a sitemap.

You can find the sitemap of any public website this way, including a competitor's. Their sitemap shows which sections they want indexed, how many pages each holds and, through lastmod dates, which pages they updated recently.

1. Open the Find tab and enter the domain, such as example.com.
2. Read the robots.txt line first: a sitemap named there is the one the site owner chose.
3. Pick the index if there is one, then switch to Validate URL and paste its address to see its child sitemaps.
4. To pull every URL into a list, use the sitemap URL extractor on the same address.

If nothing is found, the site may have no sitemap, may keep it at an unusual address that robots.txt does not name, or may refuse requests from checkers. One run tries at most 8 sitemap addresses, so a robots.txt that lists more shows the rest as not fetched.

The Validate URL tab fetches a sitemap and checks it against the sitemap protocol at sitemaps.org, which Google, Bing and other search engines follow. The Paste XML tab runs the same checks on XML you paste, up to 60 KB, without fetching anything; for a larger file, validate it by URL instead.

For a sitemap index, the validator fetches each child sitemap once, up to 50, and reports its status, type and URL count, plus any problems inside it. An index that lists another index is flagged, because the protocol lets an index list sitemaps only.

RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds are accepted too, since Google reads them as sitemaps. A feed usually lists only recent posts, so it works best next to a full XML sitemap.

A sitemap is a list of pages you are asking search engines to index. Every URL in it should answer 200, be the final address of the page, and allow indexing. The validator spot-checks a spread of listed URLs, 20 by default, and labels the result as a sample of that size, because it is not every URL.

• A URL that answers 404 or 500 wastes crawl time and tells search engines the sitemap is out of date.
• A URL that redirects should be replaced by the address it redirects to.
• A deep URL that redirects to the homepage is the worst case: Google often treats it as a soft 404 and drops it.
• A URL set to noindex sends two opposite signals at once. Remove it from the sitemap, or remove the noindex.

These problems often appear after a redesign or a platform move, when old URLs stay in a sitemap that nobody regenerates. Google ignores the priority and changefreq tags, so the parts of a sitemap that matter are the URLs themselves and honest lastmod dates.