How to use
- Enter the sitemap URL (for example https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml) and click Check, or switch to Paste XML.
- Review the type, URL count, size and any problems; each problem lists a few examples.
- Optionally click Check status of the first 20 to see whether those URLs load. In a sitemap index, click Check next to each child sitemap.
Options explained
- Limits
- Under the sitemaps.org protocol a sitemap may hold at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed; split larger ones and use a sitemap index. Sitemaps fetched here may be up to 10 MB.
- lastmod
- Must use the W3C date format, such as 2026-10-11 or 2026-10-11T08:00:00+08:00. Future dates are flagged.
- hreflang
- Each URL's alternate links should include the URL itself, and language versions should point to each other.
An example with four problems
Checking this sitemap from https://example.com/sitemap.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/en/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-10-11</lastmod>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/"/>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/de/</loc>
<lastmod>11/10/2026</lastmod>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/"/>
</url>
<url>
<loc>/about</loc>
<priority>1.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>reports these, each with the offending value as an example:
| Problem | Example shown |
|---|---|
| hreflang links not returned by the other page | https://example.com/de/ ↛ https://example.com/en/ |
| lastmod not in W3C date format | https://example.com/de/ → 11/10/2026 |
| Relative path in loc | /about |
| priority outside 0.0–1.0 | /about → 1.5 |
The German page lists only itself, so it does not point back to the English page that links to it. A date written as 11/10/2026 is ambiguous, which is why only the year-first W3C forms are accepted.
Accepted values for the optional tags: lastmod may be YYYY, YYYY-MM, YYYY-MM-DD, or a full date and time with a time zone; changefreq must be one of always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never; priority is a number from 0.0 to 1.0. A file that does not start with < is read as a plain text list with one URL per line.
Frequently asked questions
Must URLs be on the same host as the sitemap?
Usually yes. Search engines ignore URLs on another host unless that site declares the sitemap with a Sitemap line in its own robots.txt.
Do priority and changefreq matter?
Google says it ignores both. They do no harm, but malformed values are still flagged here.
Does it crawl my whole site?
No. Our server downloads only the file you enter; the status check requests just the first 20 URLs, one HEAD request each. Pasted XML is checked entirely in your browser.
Privacy
This tool needs our server: what you enter or upload is sent over HTTPS, processed and then discarded, never stored. Server access logs record IP addresses and request URLs, used only to prevent abuse.