XML Sitemap Validator

What gets checked

Sitemap errors split into two kinds. Protocol errors stop the file being parsed at all. SEO errors let it parse but make it useless, or worse, make Google trust it less. This tool reports both, separated by severity.

Structure and protocol

• Root element. The file must open with urlset or sitemapindex. Anything else is not a sitemap.
• Namespace. The root must declare xmlns as http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9, exactly.
• XML declaration and encoding. A missing declaration or a leading byte order mark breaks strict parsers.
• Content-Type. Sitemaps served as text/html rather than XML are a common CDN misconfiguration.
• Size limits. 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed, both counted per file.

URL rules

• Absolute URLs. Every loc must include the protocol and host. Relative paths are silently dropped by crawlers.
• Same host. A sitemap may only list URLs on the hostname it is served from. Cross-domain entries are ignored outright.
• Escaping. Ampersands inside a loc must be written as an entity, or the XML is invalid.
• Duplicates. Repeated URLs waste crawl budget and send conflicting lastmod signals.
• Fragments. Anything after a hash is not a separate page and should not appear.
• Whitespace. Leading or trailing spaces inside a loc trip strict parsers.

Optional fields

• lastmod format. Must be a W3C datetime, not a locale date string or a timestamp.
• Future lastmod. Dates ahead of today are the fastest way to make Google stop trusting the field.
• changefreq values. Only the seven allowed keywords, from always through never.
• priority range. A decimal from 0.0 to 1.0. A uniform value across every URL carries no information at all.

How to fix a failing sitemap

1. 01

   Fix the errors first

   Anything marked as an error either breaks parsing or gets the entries silently dropped. Warnings can wait; errors cannot.

2. 02

   Check where the file comes from

   Most sitemaps are generated. Fixing the file by hand only works until the next build, so fix the generator or the plugin instead.

3. 03

   Re-run the validator

   Confirm the file parses cleanly before you go anywhere near Search Console.

4. 04

   Crawl the URLs inside it

   A clean file full of 404s still fails. The sitemap crawler checks every URL for status, indexability, and canonical conflicts.

5. 05

   Resubmit in Search Console

   Open Indexing, then Sitemaps, and resubmit. Google reports its own parse result within a few days.

Common sitemap errors and what causes them

• Could not fetch. Usually a sitemap behind authentication, blocked in robots.txt, or returning a 403 to non-browser user agents.
• Wrong namespace. Nearly always a hand-written file, or a template that copied an RSS namespace by mistake.
• Cross-domain URLs. Common after a domain migration where the generator still holds the old hostname in config.
• Invalid lastmod. A CMS writing dates in the site locale rather than in ISO 8601 form.
• Over 50,000 URLs. A generator that never learned to split, usually on a large ecommerce catalogue.
• Served as HTML. A CDN or framework rewrite catching the .xml path and returning the app shell instead of the file.

If the validator cannot find a sitemap at all, the sitemap finder checks robots.txt plus nine common locations and reports which ones exist.

Every check, and what a failure means

The checks below run against the sitemaps.org 0.9 schema. The first three are fatal: fail one and the file is not partially read, it is discarded.

Frequently asked questions