Free Sitemap Validator — Check sitemap.xml

Sitemap URL

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How to use Sitemap Validator

Enter the sitemap URL — e.g. https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml — and click “Validate”.
Read the verdict: fetch status, XML validity, entry count and flagged issues.
Fix reported errors at the source — regenerate rather than hand-patching, so the error doesn't recur.
Re-validate, then resubmit in Search Console if it previously failed there.

What is Sitemap Validator?

A sitemap validator fetches your sitemap.xml and checks that search engines can actually read it: well-formed XML, the correct namespace declaration, valid <url>/<loc> structure, sensible URL formats, and size within the 50,000-URL / 50 MB limits.

Sitemaps fail quietly: one unescaped ampersand in a URL breaks the XML parse, and engines simply skip the file — Search Console shows "Couldn't fetch" or a parse error days later, if you look. Validating at creation and after site changes catches the break the moment it happens instead.

About the Sitemap Validator

Enter your sitemap's URL and click Validate: the report covers fetchability (does the URL return the file?), XML well-formedness, required elements, entry count and the issues crawlers most often choke on.

The classic failures it catches: special characters not XML-escaped (& must be & — the #1 sitemap killer, common in URLs with parameters), the wrong content type or an HTML error page served at the sitemap URL (a misconfigured redirect or 404 page pretending to be a sitemap), relative instead of absolute URLs, mixed http/https entries, and a sitemap referencing the non-canonical domain version (www vs non-www).

When to run it: after generating a new sitemap, after CMS or plugin updates that touch it, whenever Search Console reports sitemap errors, and after site migrations — the sitemap is the map engines follow into your new structure, so it must be right first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Usually the URL returns something other than the XML file: a 404, a redirect chain, an HTML error page, or a server block on Googlebot. Fetch it in a browser and validate here — the two views localize the failure fast.

Unescaped special characters — a raw & in a URL breaks XML parsing entirely. In sitemap XML, & must be &amp;. One bad character invalidates the whole file, which is why generated beats hand-edited.

A sitemap grants discovery, not indexing. Google still judges each page on quality, uniqueness and site authority. Valid sitemap + unindexed pages = a content/authority question, not a technical one.

50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed. Past that, split into several files and list them in a sitemap index. Validators flag files approaching the limits.

Yes — https vs http, www vs non-www, trailing slash: entries should be byte-identical to the canonical URLs your pages declare. Mismatches send engines mixed signals and waste crawl on duplicates.