FeaturesHow it worksFree toolsPricingSupport
Sign inStart free audit

Free tool · no signup

XML Sitemap Checker

Validate any XML sitemap: structure, URL count, size limits, sitemap-index detection and common errors that stop search engines from reading it. Free, no signup.

What a sitemap actually does

An XML sitemap is a discovery hint, not an indexing command: it tells search engines which URLs exist and when they changed, which speeds up discovery and unlocks per-sitemap indexing stats in Search Console. It does not force anything into the index — quality and internal linking still decide that. This validator fetches your sitemap, checks it parses as XML, verifies the 50,000-URL and 50MB limits, detects sitemap-index files, and samples the URLs inside.

The details that matter

Every URL should be canonical (no redirects, no noindexed pages — those combinations are contradictions Search Console flags), and lastmod should only change when content really changes: if every URL's date bumps on every deploy, Google learns to ignore the field for your whole site. Declare the sitemap in robots.txt and submit it in Search Console. If your sitemap is missing pages you care about — or full of pages you don't — a full site crawl shows the gap between what you publish and what you promote. Check the declaration itself with the robots.txt tester.

Frequently asked questions

A single sitemap file may contain at most 50,000 URLs and be at most 50MB uncompressed. Beyond that, split into multiple sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index file.

No. A sitemap is a discovery hint, not an indexing command. Google still decides based on quality, internal linking and crawl budget. But a clean sitemap makes discovery faster and gives you indexing stats in Search Console.

Yes — Google uses lastmod only when it's consistently truthful. If every URL's lastmod changes on every deploy, the signal is ignored for your whole site.