Sitemap Validator
Is your sitemap telling search engines the truth?
An XML sitemap is a promise to crawlers: these URLs exist, they matter, and here's when they changed. Paste yours below (or fetch it live; .xml.gz and sitemap indexes included) to validate it against the sitemap protocol and explore every URL it lists, grouped by section.
What a sitemap actually does
A sitemap does not make pages rank, and listing a URL does not force indexing. It's a hint to Google about which URLs exist and which version is canonical. Where sitemaps earn their keep is discovery and freshness: pages that are new, deep, or poorly linked get found faster, and an accurate lastmod tells crawlers which pages are worth revisiting. Google has said publicly that it ignores priority and changefreq, and that it uses lastmod only when it proves consistently accurate, which is why a generator that stamps every page with build time is actually worse than having no dates at all.
The limits are hard: 50,000 URLs and 50 MB (uncompressed) per file. If you go past either, then you need to split it into multiple sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index. And a sitemap should only carry URLs that return 200, on the same host, in their canonical https form. Every redirect, 404 or stray staging URL in there teaches crawlers to trust the file a little less, so it pays to get it right.
Sitemap habits that pay off
Canonical URLs only
The https version, one host, no #fragments, no query-string variants of the same page. If the URL in the sitemap differs from the canonical tag on the page, you are sending crawlers two different stories.
Real lastmod or none
Emit lastmod from actual content-change dates and Google will use it to schedule recrawls. Stamp everything with the build timestamp and it learns to ignore the field - on your whole site.
Declare it in robots.txt
A Sitemap: https://site.com/sitemap.xml line in robots.txt is how a crawler finds the file without being told. The robots.txt RFC treats the directive as optional rather than required, but the major search engines have honoured it for years and the AI crawlers read the same file. It also travels when you cannot access Search Console.
Escape the ampersands
The classic "my sitemap is broken" cause: a raw & in a URL. XML requires &. One unescaped character invalidates the whole file for strict parsers.
Where this fits
A sitemap says "crawl these"; robots.txt says "not these". They work as a pair, so once the sitemap is clean, drop its URLs into the Robots.txt Tester to confirm nothing you're advertising is simultaneously blocked. Then check what the pages themselves declare with the Structured Data Inspector, and how they'll look when found with the SERP Snippet Preview.