Sitemap Checker

Enter a domain and this finds the sitemap the way a crawler would, validates it, follows any sitemap index, and shows what is actually in it.

How it looks for your sitemap

Give it a bare domain and it does what a crawler does, in the same order:

  1. Fetch /robots.txt and read any Sitemap: lines, which is the declared location.
  2. Fall back to the conventional paths: /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml and their common variants.
  3. If the file turns out to be a sitemap index, follow the children and total everything up.

If it cannot find one, that is itself the finding: a sitemap a crawler cannot locate is doing no work. Pass the full URL directly if yours lives somewhere unusual.

What makes a sitemap worth having

Only indexable URLs

Listing noindexed, redirecting or canonicalised URLs contradicts itself. Check a few if you are unsure.

Honest lastmod

Set from when the content changed. Stamping the build date on every URL is a known way to get the field ignored.

Declared in robots.txt

One Sitemap: line means a crawler never has to guess.

Under the limits

50,000 URLs and 50MB per file. Beyond that, split and use a sitemap index.

Frequently asked questions

Where should my sitemap live?
Anywhere on the host, though /sitemap.xml is the convention and worth keeping. What matters more is declaring it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, since that is how a crawler that has never seen your site finds it without guessing. This tool checks robots.txt first for exactly that reason.

How many URLs can one sitemap hold?
50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, whichever comes first. Past that you split into multiple files and list them in a sitemap index, which is itself a sitemap file containing sitemap entries rather than URL entries. This tool follows an index and reports the total across all the files it reads.

Does lastmod actually do anything?
Yes, when it is honest. Search engines use it to prioritise what to re-crawl. But stamping every URL with the build date on every deploy is a well-known way to have the field ignored entirely, because it stops carrying information. Set it from the date the content changed, or leave it out.

Should I include every URL on my site?
Include the URLs you want indexed and nothing else. A sitemap listing pages that are noindexed, canonicalised elsewhere, redirecting, or returning 404 sends a contradictory signal and wastes crawl attention. If a URL does not belong in search results, it does not belong in the sitemap.

What do priority and changefreq do?
Very little. Google has said publicly that it ignores both, and other engines treat them as weak hints at best. They are harmless to include and not worth spending any time tuning.

Do I still need a sitemap if I use IndexNow?
Yes. They do different jobs. IndexNow announces a change to the engines that participate; a sitemap is a standing statement of what your site contains, and it is the only one of the two that Google reads. Neither replaces the other.