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Is your sitemap doing its job?

Find and parse your sitemap, count the URLs, and catch the problems that quietly waste crawl budget: off-host URLs, missing lastmod, robots.txt gaps.

  • Follows a sitemap index and totals the URLs across it
  • Off-host URLs, HTTP on an HTTPS site, duplicates, missing lastmod
  • Checks robots.txt actually declares the sitemap

Free, no signup, no rate limit. Nothing you check is stored.

How to use the sitemap checker

  1. Enter your domain

    It looks for sitemap.xml, sitemap_index.xml and the usual variants. If yours lives somewhere unusual, paste the full URL to the file.

  2. Check the URL count against reality

    If the total is far below the number of pages you publish, your generator is filtering something out — often drafts, paginated archives, or an entire section.

  3. Read the lastmod coverage

    Entries without a lastmod give crawlers no way to prioritise. A sitemap where nothing carries one makes every page look equally stale.

  4. Confirm robots.txt declares it

    The Sitemap line in robots.txt is how a crawler finds the file without being told. It is free and it reaches every crawler, including the AI ones.

What actually breaks a sitemap

Malformed XML is rare because generators produce it. The failures that matter are quieter: URLs on a different host, which is invalid and causes the whole file to be ignored for those entries; HTTP URLs listed on an HTTPS site, every one of which costs a redirect before the real page is reached; and duplicate entries, which usually mean two plugins are both writing the file. None of these throw an error anywhere you would see one.

Why a sitemap will not get you indexed on its own

A sitemap tells an engine a URL exists. It does not tell it the URL is worth having. Pages that appear only in the sitemap — with no internal link pointing at them — are routinely discovered and then not indexed, because discovery and inclusion are separate decisions. Treat the sitemap as a completeness check on your internal linking rather than a substitute for it. If a page matters, something on your site should link to it.

Questions about this tool

How do I check if my sitemap is valid?
Enter your domain. This finds the file, parses it, follows a sitemap index one level, and reports URL counts plus the problems that matter: URLs on another host (which is invalid), HTTP URLs on an HTTPS site, duplicates, and how many entries carry a lastmod.
Does this check every URL for 404s?
No — a large sitemap would mean thousands of requests from us to your server, which isn't a reasonable thing for a free tool to do. It checks a small random sample and says so. For a full crawl, use Search Console's coverage report.
Does lastmod matter?
Yes. It is the freshness signal crawlers use to decide what to re-fetch. A sitemap where nothing has a lastmod gives them no way to prioritise, so everything looks equally stale.
How many URLs can a sitemap hold?
50,000 per file, and 50MB uncompressed. Beyond that, split it and point at the parts from a sitemap index.
Do I need to declare my sitemap in robots.txt?
It is the standard way a crawler discovers it without being told. Submitting in Search Console works too, but the robots.txt line is free and reaches every crawler, including the AI ones.

Other free tools

AI Crawler CheckerParses robots.txt for 12 crawler agents and control tokens, then probes selected user agents for possible access problems.robots.txt GeneratorGenerates robots.txt with AI training and AI search crawlers as separate toggles — the distinction most generators miss.AEO ScannerAll ten signals at once, scored out of 100.Run a scan

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