XML Sitemap Validator: Check Your Sitemap Against the Rules

How to use the xml sitemap validator

1. Copy the contents of your sitemap.xml file.
2. Paste the XML into the text area above.
3. The sitemap validator checks structure, tags and limits automatically as you type.
4. Review the summary for errors, warnings and entry counts.

What this xml sitemap validator checks

This tool acts as a comprehensive sitemap xml validator by enforcing every rule from the sitemaps.org protocol. It first reads the file with a built-in XML parser to confirm it is well-formed (matching tags, escaped ampersands, legal characters and a declared namespace), then applies the sitemaps.org rules to each entry.

The checks include verifying that the root element is either <urlset> or <sitemapindex>, that every entry contains a required <loc> tag, and that all URLs are absolute and begin with http:// or https://. It also validates optional fields like <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority> against their allowed formats and ranges, checks the element order the schema requires (loc, lastmod, changefreq, priority) and the xmlns namespace. It does not request the URLs, so it cannot tell you whether a page returns 200, and it does not expand custom DTD entities.

Sitemaps.org limits and rules

The official protocol enforces strict limits to keep files manageable for search engines. A single sitemap file must not exceed 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB (52,428,800 bytes) uncompressed. If your site exceeds these thresholds, you must split the content across multiple files and reference them using a sitemap index.

This xml sitemap validator checks all of these constraints and reports exactly which rule was violated if an issue is found. Empty files, a missing namespace and a declared encoding other than UTF-8 are also reported as errors.

Date formats for lastmod

The <lastmod> tag must use W3C Datetime encoding. In practice that means a complete date like 2024-01-15 or a full timestamp such as 2024-01-15T14:30:00+00:00. The month must be between 01 and 12, and the day must be valid for that month, so 2024-02-30 is an error. Shorter W3C forms such as 2024-06 or a time without seconds are reported as warnings, because the official sitemaps.org schema does not accept them.

A common mistake is using Unix timestamps or non-standard formats like 01/15/2024. Malformed dates give crawlers nothing useful, which defeats the purpose of providing them. The sitemap validator flags any <lastmod> value that does not strictly match the W3C specification.

Common sitemap mistakes

When running a sitemap xml validator, developers frequently encounter a few recurring issues. Duplicate URLs are among the most common. Including the same <loc> twice is redundant and wastes crawler effort. This tool lists duplicates as a warning, since the schema itself does not forbid them.

Another frequent error is using relative URLs like /about instead of absolute ones like https://example.com/about. The protocol requires the full scheme and domain. Additionally, placing HTML entities or unescaped ampersands inside <loc> tags breaks XML well-formedness. If you need to inspect the raw tree structure, you can use an xml viewer to visualize the document before validating it.

Sitemap index vs URL set

A sitemap file uses one of two root elements. A <urlset> contains individual page entries wrapped in <url> tags. A <sitemapindex> contains references to other sitemap files wrapped in <sitemap> tags. You cannot mix both types in a single document.

If you need to create a new file from scratch, consider using a sitemap generator to ensure the initial structure is correct. Once generated, paste the output into this xml sitemap validator to confirm it meets all requirements before submitting it to search consoles. For general XML syntax checking outside of sitemaps, a standard xml validator handles arbitrary schemas.

Worked examples