Free tool
Sitemap validator
Enter a sitemap URL and we'll check it against the spec.
Fetches an XML sitemap and checks it against the constraints search engines actually enforce — the 50,000 URL and 50MB ceilings, valid changefreq and priority values, W3C datetime lastmod, absolute URLs, and duplicates.
How it works
- 1
We fetch the sitemap and parse it as XML, handling both urlset and sitemapindex documents.
- 2
Every entry is checked: absolute URL, valid changefreq from the seven allowed values, priority between 0.0 and 1.0, and W3C datetime lastmod.
- 3
The file is checked against the 50,000 URL and 50MB uncompressed limits, and scanned for duplicate URLs.
Questions about this tool
- What breaks a sitemap in practice?
- Relative URLs and a bad lastmod format, far more often than the size limits. Both are accepted by most parsers and quietly ignored by crawlers, so nothing appears to be wrong.
- Does an invalid priority actually matter?
- Less than people think — most search engines largely ignore priority. But a value outside 0.0-1.0 can invalidate the element, and an invalid element can take the URL with it.
- My sitemap is over 50,000 URLs. What now?
- Split it into shards and list them in a sitemap index. Smaller shards are better than the maximum anyway, because Search Console reports indexation per file, so a 5,000-URL shard tells you which section is failing.
Related tools and reading
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Sitemap checker
Finds your sitemap via robots.txt or the usual locations, checks that it parses, expands sitemap indexes, and reports how many URLs it declares.
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Sitemap URL counter
Counts URLs in a sitemap. Given a sitemap index it follows the children and reports the total plus a per-file breakdown, which is how you find the one shard that quietly stopped generating.
term
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Search increasingly returns synthesised answers rather than links. AEO is the unglamorous work of making sure the facts about your business — what it is, who it's for, what it costs — are stated plainly enough to be quoted correctly.
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Sitemap URL counter
Counts URLs in a sitemap. Given a sitemap index it follows the children and reports the total plus a per-file breakdown, which is how you find the one shard that quietly stopped generating.
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Sitemap structure analyzer
Analyses the shape of your URL set rather than its contents: how deep pages sit, which sections dominate, and what extensions appear. Deep pages cost crawl budget, and this is how you find them.