Sitemap validator
Check your sitemap is readable before you rely on it to get pages found.
Free, instant, and nothing to sign up for.
This checked one thing. A full audit reads the whole site and tells you what to fix first.
Run the free auditWhat this checks
- Whether the XML parses, and whether it is a sitemap or a sitemap index
- How many entries it declares, and a sample of them
- Malformed URLs and invalid lastmod dates
- Whether the file is within the size and entry limits search engines accept
Why it matters
A sitemap is how you tell search engines which pages exist, which matters most for the pages nothing links to. It is a hint rather than an instruction, but a broken sitemap is worse than none: a file that fails to parse is discarded whole, so every page in it loses the one signal it had. Sitemaps generated by a plugin are the usual culprits, because nobody opens them.
How to read the result
Valid means the file is readable and the URLs are well formed. It does not mean the pages are indexable, and this is where most sitemaps go wrong in practice: a sitemap listing pages that are noindexed, redirected or blocked in robots.txt sends contradictory signals, telling Google a page matters while another instruction says ignore it. Cross-check anything in your sitemap against the robots.txt tester.
Common questions
Will submitting a sitemap improve my rankings?
No. It helps pages get discovered, which is a different thing. A page that ranks badly will rank exactly as badly once it is in your sitemap.
How often should the lastmod date change?
Only when the page's content genuinely changes. A sitemap where every URL claims today's date is a sitemap Google stops trusting, and it is what most automatic generators produce.
Should every page be in my sitemap?
Every page you want indexed, and nothing else. Leave out tag archives, paginated series, thin utility pages and anything carrying a noindex tag.
Other free checks
Each one answers a different question about the same page.