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Sitemap Checker and Validator

Validate any XML sitemap or sitemap index for free. See URL count, lastmod coverage, duplicates, nested sitemaps, and errors that stop search engines reading it.

How do I check a sitemap for errors?

  1. Enter a domain such as example.com, or the full address of a sitemap such as example.com/sitemap.xml.
  2. Click Check sitemap. For a bare domain, the tool uses the first Sitemap line in robots.txt, or /sitemap.xml if there is none.
  3. Read the verdict, the URL count, lastmod coverage, and duplicate count.
  4. Open each issue to see example entries. For a sitemap index, click Check next to any nested sitemap to validate it too.

What makes a sitemap invalid?

The most common problems are an unescaped & in a URL, relative URLs instead of absolute ones, dates that are not in W3C Datetime format, URLs on a different host, more than 50,000 entries in one file, and a server that returns an HTML page instead of XML. Search engines may drop a whole sitemap that is not well formed, so fix errors before warnings.

How do I find a website's sitemap?

Look for a Sitemap: line in the site's robots.txt, which you can read with the robots.txt tester, or try /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml on the domain. Entering a bare domain here tries both for you.

How do I get every URL from a sitemap?

Use a sitemap extractor. The Context.dev Map URLs API reads a domain's sitemaps, follows nested sitemap indexes, falls back to page links when there is no sitemap, and returns the URLs in one call. The free sitemap generator and extractor does the same for one domain at a time and gives you an XML file.

What can you use a sitemap checker for?

  • Validating a sitemap after a site migration or a CMS change
  • Finding duplicate or off-host URLs that search engines will reject
  • Checking that lastmod dates are present and believable
  • Reviewing which sub-sitemaps a large site publishes
  • Reading a competitor's sitemap before you crawl it

Frequently asked questions

Is the sitemap checker free?
Yes. You can check up to 50 sitemaps a day, with no account needed.
What does the sitemap validator check?
It checks that the XML is well formed, that the root is a urlset or sitemapindex with the sitemaps.org namespace, that every loc is an absolute http or https URL under 2,048 characters, and that lastmod, changefreq, and priority values are valid. It also counts duplicates and flags URLs on a different host than the sitemap.
What are the size limits for a sitemap?
The sitemaps.org protocol allows up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per sitemap file. Larger sites split their URLs across several files and list them in a sitemap index. This tool reads up to 10 MB of a file and reports the limits when it can see them exceeded.
Does the checker support sitemap indexes and gzip files?
Yes. A sitemap index is reported with its list of nested sitemaps, and you can check each one in a click. Files that end in .xml.gz are decompressed before they are checked. Text sitemaps with one URL per line are supported as well.
Why does lastmod coverage matter?
Google uses lastmod when it is consistently accurate, and ignores it when it is not. A sitemap where every URL shares the same date or the dates are in the future teaches crawlers to disregard the field. Coverage shows the share of entries that have a valid date.
How is this different from a sitemap generator or extractor?
The checker validates a sitemap that already exists. The free sitemap generator and extractor builds an XML file for a domain, and the Context.dev Map URLs API at https://www.context.dev/map returns every URL on a domain as JSON.

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