Sitemap XML Validator
A sitemap with one error can be discarded entirely. This validator checks the structure Google cares about and reports the problems it will reject.
How this tool works
A sitemap with one error can be discarded in full. The XML has to be well formed, every loc has to be a full absolute URL on the declared host, the file has to be under the size and URL limits, and the lastmod dates have to be plausible. Google is tolerant of a good deal, but not of malformed XML, and it is unforgiving about a sitemap that points at a host it cannot fetch.This validator parses the document and reports what a crawler would find: the URL count against the 50,000 limit, the file size against the 50 MB limit, the lastmod dates, and any URL that is not on the declared host or is a redirect rather than a 200. It also reports coverage, which is the number that matters most: a sitemap of 1,200 URLs on a site with 4,000 pages is a coverage problem, not a syntax problem, and it is invisible in the file itself.
When to use it
- Validate a sitemap before submitting it
- Check a sitemap that Google is reporting as having errors
- Measure the coverage of a sitemap against the site
- Audit the lastmod dates, which are a common source of crawling problems
Frequently asked questions
What is the maximum number of URLs in a sitemap?
50,000 per file, and 50,000 files per sitemap index, so the index can describe up to 2.5 billion URLs in principle.
What is the maximum sitemap size?
50 MB uncompressed, and the file is gzipped in practice, so a sitemap of several million URLs is reasonable.
What does a wrong lastmod date do?
It wastes crawl budget. If every URL carries a date that changes on every build, the crawler re-fetches the whole site every time. A lastmod should reflect a real content change.
Should a sitemap include redirects?
No. A sitemap should contain only canonical 200 URLs. A redirect in a sitemap is a waste of the crawler's time and can trigger a coverage warning.
Does having a sitemap help ranking?
Not directly. It helps discovery and it tells a crawler what the site considers important, and on a large site that is worth a great deal in crawl efficiency.
Why is my sitemap not indexed?
Usually the URLs are not canonical, or they redirect, or the sitemap is not reachable, or it is blocked in robots.txt. The validator checks the first two; the last two are a configuration question.
Should I use a sitemap index?
Yes, on any site with more than a few thousand URLs. It lets you split by section, which makes the coverage of each section visible.