Free XML sitemap validator
Check a sitemap against the sitemaps.org protocol and Google's limits of 50,000 URLs and 50 MB per file. Paste a sitemap URL or the XML itself.
What this checks
The validator follows the sitemaps.org protocol and the limits Google documents.
- The XML is well-formed and the root is urlset or sitemapindex, with the sitemaps.org namespace.
- At most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. A gzipped sitemap is fine, but the limit counts the uncompressed size.
- Every loc is an absolute http or https URL on the same host as the sitemap, with no duplicates and at most 2,048 characters.
- Every lastmod is a valid W3C Datetime, such as 2026-10-21.
- Tags Google ignores (priority, changefreq) are flagged as notes, and image, video, news and hreflang extensions are recognized.
- For a URL, it also requests up to 20 of its pages and reports status codes, redirects and noindex headers. That is a sample, not a crawl.
Source: Google's sitemap guidelines
Questions
How many URLs can a sitemap have?
Up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file, whichever you reach first. Larger sites split the list into several sitemaps and point to them from a sitemap index, which can list up to 50,000 sitemaps.
Does Google use priority and changefreq?
No. Google ignores both. It does use lastmod when the dates are consistently accurate, so only set it to the real date of the last meaningful change.
Why does Search Console say it could not read my sitemap?
Usually the URL does not return 200, it returns an HTML page instead of XML, the XML is not well-formed, or the namespace is wrong. This validator checks all four.
Rather not fix it by hand?
GenMap crawls your site and writes the sitemap.xml for you, with only indexable pages, split into an index when it passes the limits.
Generate a valid sitemap free