Sitemap Validator

What Is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a file you place on your web server that lists every page you want search engines to know about. Think of it as a table of contents for your website — instead of waiting for Googlebot to discover pages by crawling links, you hand it a complete list upfront.

A basic sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page-one</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-01-15</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page-two</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-02-20</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Only <loc> (the URL) is required. The other elements are optional hints to search engines.

Why Validate Your Sitemap?

A broken sitemap is often worse than having no sitemap at all — search engines may partially process it and skip pages, or simply reject it. Common errors that our validator catches:

XML syntax errors — Unclosed tags, invalid characters, or encoding issues that make the sitemap unparseable.

Missing namespace declaration — The xmlns attribute on <urlset> must point to the sitemap protocol URL exactly.

Relative URLs — All <loc> values must be absolute URLs including the protocol (https://). Relative paths like /blog/post-1 are invalid.

URLs exceeding 2,048 characters — The sitemap protocol has a hard limit on URL length. Longer URLs are silently ignored.

Dates in wrong format — <lastmod> must use W3C date format: YYYY-MM-DD or the full ISO 8601 datetime YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD.

Invalid priority values — <priority> must be a decimal between 0.0 and 1.0. Values outside this range will cause the sitemap to be rejected.

Invalid changefreq values — Must be one of: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never. Anything else is invalid.

URLs from different domains — All URLs must be from the same domain (and subpath) as the sitemap itself.

Sitemap Size Limits

If your site has more than 50,000 pages, you need a sitemap index file — a sitemap that lists multiple sub-sitemaps. Each sub-sitemap can list up to 50,000 URLs.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-1.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-2.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Common Sitemap Mistakes

Including URLs that return 4xx or 5xx status codes. Your sitemap should only list pages that actually work. Including broken URLs wastes crawl budget.

Including noindex pages. If a page has a noindex meta tag, don't include it in your sitemap. This sends conflicting signals — you're telling Google both "please index this" and "please don't."

Including duplicate URLs. If your page is accessible at both https://example.com/page and https://example.com/page/, pick one canonical version and include only that.

Forgetting to submit. Generating a sitemap and putting it on your server isn't enough — you need to submit the URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools so search engines know it exists.

How to Submit Your Sitemap

Google Search Console:

1. Open Search Console → Sitemaps
2. Enter your sitemap URL (usually https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml)
3. Click Submit

Via robots.txt — a common alternative is to reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file so any crawler finds it automatically:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Related Search Queries

To help users find exactly what they are looking for, this tool is also optimized for searches like: sitemap xml checker, check xml sitemap, validate xml sitemap.