Sitemap Checker & Validator Online

Last updated: What’s new

Find a site's sitemap, inspect sitemap indexes and flag access or XML structure issues. Listed page status and indexability need separate checks.

Paste a website URL, hit the button, and check the sitemap XML files:

How the Sitemap Checker Works

This tool finds and validates XML sitemaps for any domain you enter. Here's the process:

  1. Enter a domain, type or paste any website address. The tool handles URL normalization automatically.
  2. Discovery, the checker probes common sitemap paths (/sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /sitemap.xml.gz) and checks your robots.txt for sitemap references.
  3. Validation, once found, the tool verifies accessibility, parses the XML structure, detects sitemap index files with child sitemaps, and flags common issues.

Why Your XML Sitemap Matters for SEO

A sitemap helps URL discovery but does not guarantee discovery, crawling or indexing. Search engine crawlers use sitemaps to find pages they might otherwise miss. That matters most in these situations:

  • New websites, few backlinks means crawlers visit less often. A sitemap gives them every URL upfront.
  • Large sites, if your site has hundreds or thousands of pages, deep content can go undiscovered without a sitemap pointing the way.
  • After a migration, new URLs, new structure, new domain? Your sitemap is the fastest way to tell Google what exists now.
  • Orphan pages, pages with no internal links are invisible to crawlers. A sitemap is their only path in. Use the Internal Link Analyzer to find and fix orphan pages on your site.

Sitemaps work hand-in-hand with your robots.txt file. Together, they tell crawlers what to access and where to find it. Need to build a new sitemap from scratch? Try the XML Sitemap Generator to crawl your site and generate one automatically. If you're investing in SEO, a clean sitemap is non-negotiable.

XML Sitemap Best Practices

A sitemap that exists isn't always a sitemap that works. Here's what to get right:

  • Only include indexable URLs, no redirects, no noindex pages, no 404s. Every URL in your sitemap should return a 200 and be the canonical version. To test that, copy the URL list from the report and run it through the bulk HTTP Status Code Checker, up to 50 URLs at a time.
  • Keep <lastmod> honest, only update it when content actually changes. Faking daily updates doesn't trick Google, it teaches them to ignore your timestamps.
  • Reference it in robots.txt, add a Sitemap: line pointing to your sitemap URL. Not required, but it helps crawlers find it without relying on Search Console alone.
  • Use a sitemap index for large sites, the XML sitemap spec caps individual files at 50,000 URLs. Split into child sitemaps and group them under an index file.
  • Submit to Google Search Console, after creating or updating your sitemap, submit it in GSC. Google will report any errors and show indexing coverage.

AI search engines like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews also use sitemaps to discover content. If GEO is part of your strategy, a well-maintained sitemap helps both traditional and AI crawlers find your pages. New to this? Our guide to what a sitemap is and why it matters covers the fundamentals.

What’s new

  • Explains when the checker is busy or a connection has reached its quota and gives the time to retry.

  • Validates the parsed XML root, skips unusable discovery responses and separates unsupported child formats from scan limits. Sitemaps served as text/html now pass with a content-type warning; HTML pages stay rejected.

Next steps

Sitemap Checker & Validator related tools and articles

Continue with the closest follow-up checks and guides based on this tool's topic, crawl intent, and optimization workflow.

What Is a Sitemap? XML Examples, Submission and Indexing Checks

Technical SEO Audit: What to Check and How to Fix It

How to Use Google Search Console: A Guide for Business Owners

Robots.txt Tester & Validator

XML Sitemap Generator

Google Index Checker: Indexability Pre-check

Sitemap Checker & Validator: FAQ

How do I find a website's sitemap?
Open the site's robots.txt and look for Sitemap: lines, then try common paths such as /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml. This checker does both for you: enter the domain and it reports which sitemap URL it found.
Can I check whether the URLs in my sitemap return 200?
Not in this checker. It reads the sitemap structure but does not request the listed pages. Use Copy URLs, then paste up to 50 at a time into the bulk HTTP Status Code Checker to see 200, redirect and 404 responses.
How does the checker discover a sitemap?
It first requests robots.txt on the entered host over HTTPS, with HTTP as a fallback, and keeps up to four Sitemap directives. It then tries those URLs plus sitemap.xml, sitemap_index.xml, and sitemap.xml.gz on the host, stopping at the first response recognized as sitemap XML.
What do XML syntax checked and Supported sitemap mean here?
The checker validates XML syntax and inspects the parsed document for exactly one actual urlset or sitemapindex root, then extracts direct loc and lastmod elements from its entries. HTTP success, accepted XML syntax and supported sitemap format are separate results. An HTML page is rejected, even when its body contains sitemap markup. A well-formed sitemap served with an HTML Content-Type, such as text/html from a PHP script, is accepted with a warning to send application/xml or text/xml. This is not XML Schema validation, namespace validation, or a check of every sitemap requirement. DTDs and custom entity declarations are unsupported.
Does this checker support RSS or Atom sitemaps?
Google supports RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds as sitemap formats, but this checker only handles XML urlset and sitemapindex documents. A feed is reported as an unsupported format, not as universally invalid. Discovery continues to the next candidate.
How should I interpret the URL count and Copy URLs button?
For a urlset, the count is based on direct url entries under its parsed root. For an index, it counts direct sitemap entries, not the URLs inside the child files. The tool retains at most 5,000 extracted URLs from the chosen urlset for display and copying. A count above 5,000 can therefore be accurate while the copied list is capped.
How far does it expand a sitemap index?
The main index is parsed for child sitemap locations, but the server fetches only the first five children with at most two requests at once. Each child has an eight-second request limit, a 5 MB uncompressed body cap, and up to 5,000 retained URLs. The entire report stops after about 35 seconds.
Why does the footer say cached: true?
The report is kept in the server instance's in-memory cache for up to ten minutes. A recent sitemap deployment may not appear until that entry expires. Check the public sitemap URL directly when verifying an urgent change.
Does a clean result prove all listed pages are indexable?
No. The tool does not request every URL or compare canonicals, robots directives, noindex, status codes, hreflang, or content quality. It confirms discovery and basic structure. Use Search Console and a site crawl to validate submitted URLs and indexing signals.
What can cause Sitemap not found, too large, or Invalid XML?
The sitemap may use a nonstandard location not declared in robots.txt, return a non-2xx response, exceed the 5 MB uncompressed scan limit, time out, be blocked by a firewall, contain malformed XML, return an HTML page, or use a format this checker does not support. An oversized response is reported separately rather than treated as a missing URL.
What sitemap data is retained?
The checked host and fetched report, including extracted URLs, may remain in an instance-local memory cache for up to ten minutes. This endpoint does not write a durable search history or database record.

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