Sitemap Validator — check your XML sitemap for errors

What an XML sitemap is for

A sitemap is a list of the pages on a site that you want search engines to find and index, with the date each one last changed. Crawlers still discover most pages through links, but a sitemap is how new, deep and rarely linked pages get found quickly — product pages, articles, landing pages — and it's the list Google Search Console checks your index coverage against. That makes it a promise: every URL in it should be a live, indexable, canonical page. A sitemap that lists redirects, 404s or noindex pages breaks that promise, and search engines learn to trust it less.

What this sitemap checker validates

Finding the sitemap

Enter a domain and the validator reads robots.txt for its Sitemap: lines, the way Bing, Apple and AI crawlers find sitemaps. If there are none, it tries the addresses CMSs and plugins use — /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /sitemap-index.xml and /wp-sitemap.xml — and tells you to declare what it finds. Enter a sitemap's own address to check that file directly. A sitemap that redirects, answers with an error, or returns an HTML page instead of XML is flagged first, because nothing else matters if a crawler can't read the file.

The XML itself

Each file is parsed the way a search engine parses it: well-formed XML (one unescaped & in a URL makes the whole file unreadable — the error shows the line and column), the http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 namespace, UTF-8 encoding, and the limits of 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. Sitemap indexes are followed to their sitemaps — up to ten, spread across the index — and nested indexes or child sitemaps on another host are pointed out. Gzipped sitemaps are decompressed in your browser.

Every URL in it

All listed URLs are checked without a single request: they must be absolute, on the sitemap's own host (www and non-www are different hosts), https on an https site, properly encoded and under 2,048 characters, and listed only once. <lastmod> dates must use the W3C format and not lie in the future; when nearly every URL has the same timestamp, the date is the generation time, not the page's. Image, video, news and hreflang entries are recognised and checked for their required fields — a news sitemap's two-day window and 1,000-article limit, an hreflang group that forgets to list itself. Finally every URL is tested against your robots.txt for Googlebot, catching the "Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt" error before Search Console does.

A live sample of the pages

Up to 50 URLs, spread across all the sitemaps read, are requested live — as a browser or as Googlebot — following redirects hop by hop. The validator reports pages that are gone (404 or 410), server errors, URLs that redirect (list the destination instead), pages marked noindex in an X-Robots-Tag header or a robots meta tag, and pages whose canonical tag names a different URL. Pages behind a firewall that turns away our checker are reported as unverifiable, not broken.

How the score works

The grade starts at 100. Critical problems — no sitemap, unreadable XML, URLs blocked by robots.txt, listed pages that are gone or marked noindex — cost the most; warnings such as redirects, duplicates or invalid dates cost less; suggestions cost nothing. The share of live-checked URLs with a problem lowers the score further. Every finding comes with what it means and how to fix it, and checks that passed are listed too.

Export every URL

Download CSV exports every URL the sitemaps list — with its sitemap file, lastmod, changefreq, priority, image and hreflang counts, the robots.txt verdict and the live-check result where there is one. It's the quickest way to get a full page inventory into a spreadsheet, to compare it with your analytics, or to hand a list of problem URLs to a developer.

Watch a competitor's sitemap for new pages

A sitemap is a public list of everything a site wants found, so it's also the earliest signal of what a competitor is launching: new product pages, new landing pages, new articles, often before they're promoted. Run any site through the validator to see its sitemaps, then let Monity watch one and alert you when new URLs appear — see how new-page alerts work.

Related tools

The Robots.txt Tester shows which rule blocks a URL and which search and AI crawlers can reach it, the Redirect Checker traces a redirect chain hop by hop, the Broken Link Checker finds dead links inside your pages, and the SEO & AI Visibility Audit checks titles, canonicals and structured data page by page.

Get alerted when pages drop out of the index

Sitemap problems rarely arrive alone: a deploy adds noindex to a template, a migration leaves old URLs redirecting, a plugin update starts blocking a folder in robots.txt. Monity re-checks the pages that matter on a schedule and alerts you in email, Slack or Teams when one turns noindex, starts returning a 404, or its canonical or robots rules change. The free plan includes three monitors, forever.