This tool checks the structure of the sitemap text you provide. It does not visit your website, and your file is never uploaded or stored.
How to use the XML sitemap validator
Open your sitemap.xml file, copy its contents and paste them into the box above, or upload the file. Click Validate Sitemap to see whether it follows the sitemap rules. Problems are listed with the entry they belong to, with errors shown first and then warnings.
What does the validator check?
- Well-formed XML: the file can be read without syntax errors, such as unclosed tags or unescaped ampersands.
- Correct structure: the root is a urlset (or a sitemapindex for an index file) with the standard sitemap namespace.
- URLs: every entry has a loc, it is a full http or https address, it is under 2,048 characters, and it is not a duplicate.
- Dates: lastmod values use a valid W3C date format, are real calendar dates, and are not in the future.
- Optional values: changefreq uses an allowed word, and priority is a number from 0.0 to 1.0.
- Limits and consistency: no more than 50,000 entries and 50 MB per file, and URLs from a single host using one protocol.
What this tool cannot check
The validator only checks the text of the file you give it. It does not visit your website, so it cannot tell whether the listed pages load correctly, redirect, are blocked by robots.txt, or are marked noindex. Compressed .gz sitemaps need to be unzipped first. For a final check, submit the sitemap in Google Search Console, which reports pages it could not fetch or index.
Need to create a sitemap? Use our XML Sitemap Generator, and point crawlers to it with our Robots.txt Generator.