Sitemap Validator.
Validate the XML. Crawl every URL. Surface every problem.
Paste a sitemap URL and we parse the XML against the sitemap protocol, then fetch every listed URL to confirm status, response time, and indexability — flagging duplicates, 4xx/5xx, redirects, and orphan URLs that don't belong.
Bookmark-worthy moments.
Four moments when a broken sitemap is silently costing you indexation — and you'd never know without scanning.
Validate after a site migration
Migrated to a new CMS or restructured your URLs? Re-fetch the sitemap, confirm every URL returns 200, catch the 30% that 301-redirect into a chain or 404 outright.
Pre-flight before submitting to Search Console
Before you submit a new sitemap to Google, validate it locally. Malformed XML or unreachable URLs cause GSC to reject the whole file — better to catch it here than wait three days for the bounce.
Audit for stale URLs and orphans
Sitemaps often outlive the URLs in them. The tool flags every entry that 404s, redirects, or hasn't been updated in 18 months. Clean it up; Google trusts you more.
Confirm crawlers can actually reach every URL
Listing a URL in your sitemap doesn't mean it's crawlable. We follow each URL with a Googlebot user-agent and report whether robots.txt, noindex, or auth would block it.
Why sitemaps still matter in 2026.
Google says it can find your URLs without one. That's true and irrelevant — here's why you still need a clean sitemap.
Search engines have repeatedly said that they can crawl your site without a sitemap. This is true for small sites with good internal linking. It is wildly false for large sites, e-commerce catalogs, content archives, and anything that lives behind imperfect navigation. The sitemap exists to tell Google about URLs it might otherwise miss, and — just as importantly — to communicate priority and freshness signals it can't infer from your link graph alone.
The sitemap protocol is small but exacting. The XML must be well-formed, no more than 50MB or 50,000 URLs per file (use a sitemap index for more), every URL must be on the same host, and every URL should return 200 OK when fetched. Most production sitemaps fail at least one of these silently — and a 'partially valid' sitemap is treated worse than no sitemap at all by some crawlers.
This tool validates the XML structure against the official protocol, then fetches every URL in the sitemap (in parallel, respecting your robots.txt) to confirm each one is reachable, returns a 200, isn't redirected, isn't blocked, and isn't a duplicate of another URL in the same sitemap. The output is a single report with every problem ranked by severity, and the exact spec citation for each.
Sitemap protocol · quick reference
The URL. Required. Must be a full absolute URL on the same host as the sitemap.
<loc>https://x.com/page</loc>Last modification date. Optional but useful — Google uses it as a freshness signal.
2026-06-29T14:32:00+00:00How often the URL changes. Largely ignored by Google in 2026 — informational only.
daily / weekly / monthlyRelative importance 0.0-1.0. Also largely ignored by Google now.
0.8Max URLs per sitemap file. Use a sitemap index (XML of sitemaps) to scale beyond.
50,000 URLs per fileMax uncompressed file size. Compressing with gzip is supported and recommended.
50 MB uncompressedEvery URL must be on the same host as the sitemap file itself.
No cross-domain entriesA sitemap of sitemaps. Use when you have more than 50K URLs total.
<sitemapindex>Asked. Answered.
Tool questions, topic questions — straight answers. Anything missing? Email hi@seonova.io and we'll fold it in.
For small, well-linked sites: not strictly. For large or poorly-linked sites: yes, materially. Even on small sites, a clean sitemap helps Google understand priority and recency in a way internal links alone can't. The cost of providing one is essentially zero.
More to bookmark.
Tools that share the same engine — and tend to land in the same tab group.
Keep your sitemap honest, forever.
SEONova Pro re-validates every sitemap you own daily, alerts on broken or redirected URLs the morning they appear, and auto-segments large catalogs into spec-compliant sitemap indexes. The free tool catches problems. The platform prevents them.