Validate an XML sitemap or sitemap index by URL, upload or paste. Checks protocol limits, dates and URLs, reads image, video, news and hreflang entries, and can test each listed URL for redirects, noindex, canonicals and robots.txt blocks.
Sitemap indexes and .xml.gz files are supported.
An invalid sitemap can prevent search engines from properly crawling your site. This tool checks your sitemap against the sitemap protocol, verifying well-formed XML, correct root elements, valid URL formats, duplicate detection, and missing required fields — so you can fix issues before they impact your SEO.
Need to create a sitemap first? Use our Sitemap Generator. Want to export the URLs for a spreadsheet audit? Try the Sitemap to CSV Converter. For general XML validation beyond sitemaps, use the XML Validator.
Errors break the sitemap protocol: malformed XML, a root other than <urlset> or <sitemapindex>, missing or relative <loc> values, more than 50,000 entries, or more than 50MB uncompressed. Warnings cover entries that are allowed but worth fixing: invalid or future <lastmod> dates, duplicate URLs, the same URL with different dates, mixed http and https, fragments, tracking parameters, credentials in URLs, URLs on another host, and hreflang sets that do not include the page itself. Notices are suggestions, such as missing dates or most entries sharing one date.
For a sitemap index, click a child sitemap to validate it, or use Check child sitemaps to count each child's entries and size (including .xml.gz files) and find nested indexes. For a regular sitemap, Check URLs requests up to 100 URLs at a time and reports status codes, redirects, noindex in the page or the X-Robots-Tag header, canonicals pointing to another URL, and Googlebot rules in robots.txt that block the URL, with the matching line.
Live checks read the raw HTML only. They do not run JavaScript and do not show whether Google has indexed a page. You can link straight to a result with /tools/sitemap-validator/?url=https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-09-01</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>/about/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter</loc>
<lastmod>01/09/2026</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>✕ Error: Relative URL (1)
⚠ Warning: Invalid <lastmod> date (1)
⚠ Warning: URL contains tracking parameters (1)
ℹ Notice: No <lastmod> (1)