Sitemap Validator

Sitemap Validator fetches your site's sitemap.xml directly and shows whether the format is valid, what kind it is (a regular sitemap vs a sitemap index), and how many URLs or child sitemaps it contains. Enter just a domain and it automatically looks up /sitemap.xml for you.

Search engines use sitemaps to discover and index pages efficiently. A malformed file, an empty sitemap, a non-200 response, or non-XML content can lead to missing pages in the index. Use this tool to confirm your sitemap is healthy before submitting it.

The two sitemap formats

• urlset: a regular sitemap listing actual page URLs. Each entry is a loc element.
• sitemapindex: an index that groups multiple sitemap files. Used by large sites to split sitemaps.

This tool automatically detects whether the response is a sitemapindex or a urlset, and for an index it also lists the child sitemaps.

Limits: 50,000 URLs / 50MB

A single sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs and up to 50MB uncompressed. Beyond that you must split the sitemap into several files and group them with a sitemap index. For large sites, an index structure is the safe choice.

Submitting and verifying

Declare the sitemap location in robots.txt and submit it to tools like Google Search Console. After submission, compare the reported URL count with the indexed count to spot gaps. Even a well-formed sitemap can be skipped if it returns a non-200 status or a content-type that is not XML. To add a sitemap line to robots.txt, use the robots.txt generator, and verify the live robots.txt advertises it with the robots.txt checker.

Sitemap tag reference

Each <url> entry in a urlset sitemap may carry the child tags below. In practice the only one search engines truly rely on is <loc>; the rest are weak hints or largely ignored.

Each <sitemap> entry in a sitemapindex carries only a <loc> (the child sitemap URL) and an optional <lastmod>. Nesting an index inside another index is invalid; only one level of indexing is allowed.

Worked example: detecting an index

Suppose the fetch returns the following.

Because the root is <sitemapindex>, the tool reports Format: sitemap index and lists the <loc> of the three child <sitemap> entries (e.g. /sitemap-posts.xml, /sitemap-pages.xml, /sitemap-images.xml). To learn the total URL count, re-run the check against each child sitemap URL.

Common pitfall

• BOM or leading whitespace: an invisible byte-order mark or a blank line before the <?xml ...?> declaration prevents the parser from finding <urlset>, yielding "unknown format". The file must be XML from byte one.
• Unescaped &: writing a URL like ?a=1&b=2 raw inside <loc> is an XML error; it must be encoded as &.
• HTTP 200 but HTML: a missing path that returns a friendly landing page with a 200 (a soft 404) fails the format check. Do not trust the 200 alone — verify the root tag.