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Sitemap Validator
Detect errors and orphan pages.
How this tool works
A broken sitemap.xml is invisible to you but brutal for Google: if a single URL is malformed, Google ignores the whole file and stops indexing new URLs for weeks. Most common errors: lastmod without ISO format, duplicate loc entries, files over 50 MB (Google's official limit), or more than 50,000 URLs (also limit).
This validator fetches your sitemap by URL (or paste manually), detects sitemap-index vs urlset, validates each
Frequently asked questions
- How many URLs fit in a sitemap?
- Max 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. If you have more, use sitemap-index pointing to multiple sitemap-N.xml.
- How does lastmod format work?
- ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ. 'May 2026' or '2026/04/24' are invalid — Google ignores them.
- My sitemap isn't indexing, what do I do?
- Steps: (1) test sitemap in search.google.com/search-console, (2) check robots.txt isn't blocking, (3) review 5xx errors from host, (4) confirm sitemap URLs return 200 OK (not 301/404).
- Is sitemap-index worth it?
- Yes — and mandatory for large sites. Upload 1 sitemap-index.xml linking to 10 sitemap-N.xml of 5,000 URLs each. Google processes them in parallel.