Free XML Sitemap Validator

The convention is /sitemap.xml at the root of your domain — that's where this tool (and many crawlers) look first. It can technically live anywhere, but then you must declare it: add a 'Sitemap: https://example.com/path/to/sitemap.xml' line to your robots.txt and submit the URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

A single sitemap file may contain at most 50,000 URLs and weigh at most 50MB uncompressed. Bigger sites split their URLs across multiple sitemap files and list them in a sitemap index. Exceed either limit and engines may truncate or reject the file entirely.

Yes — Google has stated it uses lastmod to prioritize recrawling, but only when the values are credible. Set lastmod to the date the content meaningfully changed, in YYYY-MM-DD or full ISO 8601 format. If you stamp every URL with the current date on every deploy, engines learn to ignore your lastmod entirely and you lose the recrawl benefit.

A sitemap of sitemaps: instead of <url> entries it contains <sitemap> entries, each pointing at a child sitemap file. It's how large sites stay under the 50,000-URL limit — split URLs across many files, list those files in one index, and submit just the index. This tool detects index files automatically and validates the first child.

No. A sitemap is a hint, not a command — it tells engines which URLs exist and when they changed, but engines still decide independently whether each page is worth crawling and indexing based on its quality, uniqueness, and the rest of your site's signals. A sitemap gets you discovered faster; it doesn't get you ranked.

Because a structurally perfect sitemap full of dead URLs is worse than no sitemap. Engines that repeatedly fetch sitemap entries and hit 404s or server errors learn to distrust the whole file. We request a small, evenly-spaced sample of the listed URLs and flag any that fail, so you catch rot before crawlers do.