Is this sitemap validator free?

Yes, with no sign-up. Pasted XML is checked in your browser and never sent to us.

Does it check every sitemap on a large site?

It follows sitemap indexes up to 20 files and 3 levels deep, then says where it stopped. That covers most sites; on very large ones it checks a representative sample.

Does it check whether each URL works?

No, that would mean crawling your site. It checks that each URL is valid and well formed. The technical SEO audit checks individual pages.

Do I need priority and changefreq?

No. Google ignores both. They do no harm, but lastmod is the only optional tag Google uses.

Does it support gzipped sitemaps?

Yes, sitemap.xml.gz files are decompressed and checked like any other.

Where should my sitemap live?

Anywhere on your site, as long as robots.txt declares it or you submit it in Google Search Console. /sitemap.xml is the convention.

Free tool

Free XML sitemap validator

Make sure Google can find every page you publish. Enter your site and we find its sitemaps through robots.txt, follow every sitemap index, and check each file against the protocol, from broken XML to future lastmod dates. Or paste XML to check it before it ships.

No sign-up
Reads your live site
Tells you what to fix

What it checks

Whether robots.txt declares your sitemap, so every crawler can find it.
That each file loads with a 200, as XML, without redirects.
Well-formed XML: every tag closed, and ampersands escaped as &.
A <urlset> or <sitemapindex> root with the sitemaps.org namespace.
Every <loc> is an absolute, valid URL on the same host, with no duplicates.
Every <lastmod> uses W3C date format and isn't in the future.
The 50,000 URL limit per file, and nested indexes Google won't follow.

How to use it

Enter your domain to check the sitemaps it declares, or a sitemap address to check that one file.
Fix errors first: they can make search engines reject the whole file.
Then warnings: they don't break the sitemap, but make it less useful.
Paste XML in the second tab to check a generated sitemap before you deploy it.

What a sitemap does and doesn't do

A sitemap lists the URLs you want search engines to know about, with the date each last changed. It helps new and deep pages get discovered, and an accurate lastmod helps Google decide what to recrawl. It doesn't make pages rank, and Google may still skip URLs it considers low value or duplicates.

Common sitemap errors and how to fix them

Problem	Fix
Not declared in robots.txt	Add a line: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
Unescaped ampersand	Write & as & inside <loc>, usually in URLs with query strings
http:// URLs on an https site	List the https:// version your pages redirect to
Every lastmod the same	Output the date each page last changed, not the build time
Redirecting or 404 URLs	List only live, canonical URLs that return a 200
Nested sitemap indexes	List every child sitemap directly in one top-level index

The problems this validator finds most often.

Once your sitemap is clean, check that AI assistants can reach the same pages with the AI visibility checker, or turn the sitemap into an llms.txt with the llms.txt generator.

Check how accessible your site is to AI crawlers

Check your site's robots rules, homepage signals and llms.txt. These checks do not measure citations in AI answers.

Start your 3-day trial See pricing

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Questions, answered

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From check to done

Check how accessible your site is to AI crawlers

Check your site's robots rules, homepage signals and llms.txt. These checks do not measure citations in AI answers.

See how it works See pricing

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