XML Sitemap Checker

Enter your domain or sitemap URL in the checker above. It confirms the document parses as XML, has a valid urlset or sitemapindex root, and stays inside the 50,000 URL and 50MB limits. It also goes further than a pure validator by requesting a sample of the URLs inside, because a sitemap can be perfectly valid XML and still be full of dead links.

Enter just your domain above and we find it for you. We check the Sitemap line in robots.txt first, since that is the authoritative declaration, then fall back to /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml. Those three cover almost every site, because that is the same order a crawler uses.

For any site, including one you do not own, try yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in a browser, or read yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for a line beginning with Sitemap:. Sitemaps are public files, so this works on competitors' sites too. The tool above does all of this in one step.

Open the sitemap URL in a browser and you will see the raw XML, a list of <url> blocks each containing a <loc>. Manually you can confirm it loads and spot obvious problems, but you cannot practically confirm that hundreds of listed URLs still resolve, or cross-check them against robots.txt. That is the part worth automating.

For a sitemap specifically, the checker above reports the parse result and the reason for any failure. Valid sitemap XML needs a single urlset or sitemapindex root in the sitemaps.org namespace, well-formed nested elements, UTF-8 encoding, and entity-escaped URLs, so an ampersand inside a loc must be written as &amp;.

For sitemaps, use a sitemap-aware validator like this one rather than a generic XML linter. A generic tool tells you the document is well-formed but knows nothing about the 50,000 URL cap, the lastmod format, or whether the URLs inside actually resolve. For non-sitemap XML, a general XML validator or your editor's built-in linter is the right tool.

A file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about, optionally with a last modified date for each. It is a discovery aid, not a ranking factor. It helps crawlers find pages that are poorly linked internally or newly published, which matters most on large sites and new ones.

A sitemap is an inventory of your site's important URLs, used to help search engines discover pages efficiently. It does not guarantee indexing and it does not improve rankings by itself. Its practical value is making sure nothing important is invisible simply because nothing links to it prominently.

Discovery, not persuasion. It tells a crawler which URLs exist and when they last changed, so crawl effort goes to the right places. If your site is small and well linked internally, a sitemap changes very little. If it is large, new, or has pages reachable only through search or filters, it matters a great deal.

Most platforms generate one automatically: WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Squarespace all do, usually at /sitemap.xml. If yours does not, our free XML Sitemap Generator will build one from a list of URLs. Once you have it, add a Sitemap line to robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.

No, and a site does not need one to be indexed. Google discovers most pages by following links. A sitemap helps when link discovery is weak, so a large site, a brand new site, or one with pages that are not linked from anywhere prominent. If the checker above finds nothing, that is a gap worth closing rather than an error.

Each <url> block holds a <loc> with the page URL, and optionally <lastmod> for when it changed. A sitemap index instead holds <sitemap> blocks, each pointing at another sitemap file. The report above turns all of this into a plain list with counts and statuses, which is easier than reading raw XML.

It depends which error. A parse failure usually means the server is returning an HTML page instead of XML, so check the URL is right. Broken URLs mean the sitemap is stale and needs regenerating. URLs blocked by robots.txt mean two systems disagree, so decide whether the page should be crawlable and fix whichever side is wrong. The checker names which of these you have.

That message in Search Console almost always means one of three things: the URL returns a non-200 status, it returns HTML rather than XML, or the file is malformed. Run the URL through the checker above, which distinguishes all three and reports the exact status code and parse error rather than a generic failure.

An HTML sitemap is an ordinary page listing links for human visitors, usually at /sitemap or linked in the footer, and it is a different thing from the XML sitemap search engines read. This tool checks XML sitemaps. If you are looking for a site's HTML sitemap, check the footer first.

The ones that touch sitemaps directly are broken links, redirect chains, pages accidentally blocked by robots.txt, and noindex tags on pages you meant to index. The checker above catches the first three where they appear in your sitemap. For redirect chains specifically, the Redirect Checker linked below goes deeper.