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XML Sitemap Validator

Fetch and validate any XML sitemap against the sitemaps.org protocol: malformed XML, invalid or duplicate URLs, oversized files, and bad lastmod, priority, or changefreq values.

Enter a full sitemap address, or just a domain to try /sitemap.xml automatically.

About this tool

This tool fetches the XML address you enter and checks it against the sitemaps.org protocol that search engines rely on to discover a site's pages. For a regular sitemap, every URL entry is checked for a valid, absolute, secure address, no duplicates, and correctly formatted lastmod, priority, and changefreq values where present, along with the overall file staying under the documented 50,000 URL and 50MB limits. For a sitemap index, it lists every child sitemap it points to so each one can be validated individually. Only the one XML file you point it at is fetched and checked, so a sitemap index's child sitemaps are not automatically followed and validated in the same pass.

Worth being direct about: a sitemap does not improve your rankings on its own. What it actually does is help search engines discover and prioritize crawling your pages faster, which is a prerequisite for ranking, not a ranking signal itself. A valid sitemap is especially useful for orphan pages, pages with no internal links pointing to them, since without one those pages can be very hard for a crawler to find at all, but pages discovered only through a sitemap still tend to get lower crawl priority than pages that are also reachable through normal internal links on the site. A sitemap is a supplement to good internal linking, not a substitute for it. Once your sitemap validates cleanly here, submitting its address in Google Search Console's Sitemaps report is the concrete next step that actually puts it in front of Google, this tool checks the file itself but does not submit it anywhere.

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Frequently asked questions

Search engines parse a sitemap as XML before reading anything inside it. A file with a syntax error, such as an unclosed tag or invalid characters, can fail to parse entirely, meaning none of the URLs it lists get read, not just the one near the broken part.
The sitemap protocol requires every loc entry to be a complete, absolute URL, including the scheme and domain, such as https://example.com/page rather than just /page. A relative address is not a valid entry and search engines will typically skip it rather than guess the intended full address.
No, only loc is required. The other fields are optional hints. Google's own Gary Illyes has publicly described priority and changefreq as a "bag of noise" Google does not use, since these values are self-reported by site owners and unreliable as a result, and John Mueller has said the same in Google's office hours going back years. lastmod is the one field still worth keeping accurate, since Google has confirmed it can help a crawler decide when to recrawl a page, but an inaccurate or missing lastmod does not make a sitemap invalid.
A regular sitemap lists actual page URLs directly. A sitemap index is one level up: it lists the addresses of other sitemap files, used when a site has more URLs than fit in one sitemap's 50,000 URL limit. This tool detects which one you gave it and checks it accordingly.
A sitemap should only list URLs from the same site it belongs to. A sitemap containing addresses from an unrelated domain is either a configuration mistake or a sign the file was generated incorrectly, and search engines generally will not credit it as evidence for a site it does not belong to.
No. The address is used only to fetch that one sitemap file for that one check, and nothing is saved. Only public web addresses can be checked: requests to private or internal network addresses are refused.
Not directly. Google's own documentation is explicit that a sitemap helps with discovery and crawling, telling Google which pages exist and roughly when they last changed, but it is not a ranking factor and does not guarantee a page will actually be crawled, indexed, or rank well. Its real value is making sure pages, especially ones with few or no internal links pointing to them, are not missed entirely, which is a precondition for ranking rather than a boost to it.
Submit its full address in Google Search Console's Sitemaps report, under Index in the left sidebar, so Google knows where to find it and checks it going forward. This tool validates the file itself, checking that it is well-formed and follows the protocol correctly, but it does not submit anything anywhere, that is a separate, manual step in Search Console once you know the file is clean.

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