Sitemap Validator
Paste any XML sitemap URL and instantly see every page inside it. Then run bulk HTTP + SEO diagnostics on up to 20 URLs at once — all without leaving this page.
💡 Works with <urlset> and <sitemapindex> files, plus .xml.gz gzip sitemaps. Try one:
Fetching and parsing sitemap…
🗺️ What Is an XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists every important URL on your site, giving search engines a map of your content. It's how you tell Google "here are all my pages, please crawl them." Sitemaps can also carry metadata like <lastmod>, <changefreq>, and <priority> to hint at freshness and importance.
There are two flavors:
- URL sitemap (
<urlset>) — a flat list of up to 50,000 URLs. The common case. - Sitemap index (
<sitemapindex>) — a list of pointers to other sitemaps. Used by large sites that split content into sections (posts, products, images, news).
Why validate a sitemap?
- Catch broken URLs — 404s in your sitemap signal lost content and waste crawl budget.
- Find redirect chains — URLs that redirect 3+ times should be updated in the sitemap to their final destination.
- Spot slow pages — Pages taking 3+ seconds hurt Core Web Vitals scores.
- Detect metadata gaps — Missing or truncated titles and descriptions in listed pages.
- Audit redirect-only URLs — Sitemaps should list the canonical URL, not intermediate redirects.
Sitemap best practices
- List only canonical, 200-status URLs — never 404s or redirects.
- Keep files under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed.
- Include
<lastmod>only when the date is accurate — fake dates erode trust. - Reference your sitemap in
robots.txt:Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml - Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Up to 500 URLs per sitemap are returned (up to 100 shown in the table). For sitemap index files, we recurse into up to 5 child sitemaps and aggregate the URLs. This covers the vast majority of real-world sitemaps; larger sites usually split content across multiple index files anyway.
You can check up to 20 URLs per batch. The URL list has checkboxes so you can select exactly which ones to test. Use "Select first 20" for a quick health snapshot, or pick specific URLs you're suspicious about.
Yes. If the server returns a gzipped body (detected by magic bytes), we decompress it automatically before parsing. Sitemaps ending in .xml.gz work out of the box.
We list all child sitemaps and (by default) recurse into the first 5 of them to collect their URLs. If you just want to see the child list without expansion, this happens automatically if there are more than 5 — only the first 5 are expanded.
Common reasons: the URL returns HTML instead of XML (a 404 page, for example), the XML has a syntax error, or the server returns a Content-Type that isn't XML. The tool shows the exact libxml error when parsing fails.
No. This is a read-only validator. To submit your sitemap to Google, use Google Search Console → Sitemaps. To submit to Bing, use Bing Webmaster Tools.
Yes — if it's publicly accessible. Competitor sitemaps are an excellent way to discover their content structure, publishing frequency (via lastmod dates), and priority assignments. Many sites deliberately block them from competitors, in which case you'll see a 403 error.
No. The sitemap URL is fetched live, parsed in memory, and cached server-side for 1 hour to keep the tool fast. No user identifiers are stored. IP addresses are hashed only for rate limiting.