XML Sitemap Validator and Checker
Paste a sitemap URL and get a report: did it fetch, did the XML parse, index or urlset, URL count against the 50,000 limit, foreign hosts, bad dates, duplicates.
A sitemap that is wrong is worse than none. Crawlers trust it, skip discovery, and read what it lists — including the staging host someone left in, the 4,000 duplicate URLs with tracking parameters, or the lastmod dates that all say the day the site launched. Search Console will tell you eventually, in its own time and its own words. If you are pointing an AI agent at the help center this week, you want to know today whether the file it will read is sound.
Paste the sitemap's URL. The tool fetches it with WireDesk's crawler and reports, line by line: whether it fetched OK, whether the XML parsed, whether it is a sitemap index or a urlset, the URL count against the 50,000-URL and 50 MB limits, any URLs on a different host, malformed <loc> entries, invalid <lastmod> dates, and duplicate URLs. If it is an index, it follows the child sitemaps one level down and checks those too. It validates the file, not the pages: it doesn't fetch every URL to see if it is live. Nothing you paste is stored beyond a short cache of the result.
This ran once, on one input. The product runs on your whole site, every conversation.
Validate the site the hard way: let an agent answer from it — start freeWhat each input means
- 01
Sitemap URL
The full address of the sitemap or the sitemap index, usually https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. If you don't know where it is, run the sitemap finder on the site first and paste what it reports.
- 02
Fetched and parsed
The first two lines of the report. A fetch failure is usually a redirect to a login, a 404, or a host that blocks unfamiliar crawlers. A parse failure means the XML is malformed — often an unescaped ampersand in a URL.
- 03
Type, count and limits
Index or urlset, then the URL count against the protocol's limits: 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. Close to either, split the file and publish an index. For an index, the count is the number of child sitemaps.
- 04
Hosts, locations, dates and duplicates
Each finding lists the offending URLs. Different host: the sitemap must only list pages on the host that serves it. Malformed <loc>: not an absolute URL. Invalid <lastmod>: not a W3C date. Duplicates: the same URL listed twice.
- 05
Child sitemaps
If you pasted an index, the report repeats for each child, one level down. Children that are themselves indexes are noted but not followed further; paste them separately if you need to go deeper.
Questions about this tool
50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per sitemap file. That is the protocol's limit and the one Google and Bing enforce. Anything bigger has to be split, with a sitemap index pointing at the parts. The index itself is also limited to 50,000 entries. Most platforms split at 1,000 or 2,000 URLs per file for easier caching, which is fine.