Sitemap Validator
Validate a sitemap.xml: XML, URLs, lastmod, duplicates and limits.
About this tool
Open your sitemap.xml file or paste its XML. You'll see whether it's valid, how many entries it has and its size, plus a list of errors (things search engines reject) and warnings (things worth fixing).
What a valid sitemap needs
An XML sitemap lists the URLs you want search engines to crawl. The sitemaps.org protocol, which Google, Bing and others follow, has firm rules. The file must be well-formed XML with a <urlset> (or <sitemapindex>) root in the sitemaps.org namespace. Every entry needs an absolute http or https <loc> with special characters encoded (a space must be %20). A file can hold at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites split into several sitemaps listed in a sitemap index. lastmod must use W3C date format, such as 2026-10-01 or 2026-10-01T10:30:00+00:00, not 01/10/2026. Google uses lastmod when it's consistently accurate, but ignores changefreq and priority. URLs should be on the same host as the sitemap, and duplicates waste crawl attention. The validator checks all of this in your browser using the XML parser. Honest limits: it checks the file, not the URLs. It can't tell whether each page returns 200, redirects, is blocked by robots.txt or carries noindex, and Search Console's sitemap report covers that. Unzip .xml.gz files before pasting. The sitemap generator, the robots.txt tester and the SEO meta analyzer are related.
Frequently asked questions
How many URLs can a sitemap have?
Up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. Use a sitemap index for more.
What date format does lastmod use?
W3C datetime: YYYY-MM-DD, or a full ISO 8601 time with a timezone.
Does Google use changefreq and priority?
No. Google ignores them. An accurate lastmod is what helps.
Is anything uploaded or fetched?
No. What you paste is processed in your browser, and nothing is fetched, stored or sent.