Free checker · SEO and Visibility
XML Sitemap Checker.
Fetches an XML sitemap or sitemap index, counts the URLs, follows the children, and flags mixed hosts, broken lastmod dates, duplicate entries and the 50,000 URL ceiling.
Enter the site, or paste the full sitemap URL if it is not at /sitemap.xml.
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What this tool measures
This fetches a sitemap or a sitemap index, parses it, and checks it against the things that actually cost indexation rather than against the schema. Schema validity is rarely the problem — the file came out of a plugin and the plugin knows the format. What is usually wrong is the content.
Sitemaps fail quietly. A sitemap listing URLs on a hostname it is not served from has those URLs discarded, with no warning anywhere. A sitemap where every entry carries the same lastmod teaches Google to stop trusting lastmod on that site, which costs you the signal on the pages that genuinely did change. Neither shows up as an error in Search Console.
How to use it
Enter the site and the tool looks at /sitemap.xml. If that is not where yours lives, paste the full URL — common alternatives are /sitemap_index.xml on Yoast, /wp-sitemap.xml on modern WordPress, and /sitemap-0.xml on several static site generators. The robots.txt checker will tell you which one the site declares.
If the file is an index, use the button to fetch the children. That is the check most validators skip, and a child sitemap returning 404 while the index happily lists it is a common and completely invisible failure.
How to read the result
Mixed hostnames and mixed schemes are the two findings to act on immediately, because both silently discard URLs. A sitemap on https://example.com may only list URLs on that exact host and scheme unless every host involved is verified in Search Console.
The lastmod findings are about signal quality rather than correctness. Google uses lastmod to prioritise recrawls. If it varies genuinely with content changes it is the most useful thing in the file; if it is stamped with the build time it is worse than absent, because it looks like information and is not.
priority and changefreq are reported as present but do nothing. Google announced it ignores both in 2015 and has repeated it since. They are harmless — there is no reason to strip them out of a generated file — but there is also no version of tuning them that helps.
What to do next
A sitemap should list the URLs you want indexed and nothing else: no redirects, no noindexed pages, no canonicalised duplicates, no 404s. Every one of those wastes a crawl and slightly weakens the signal that inclusion means anything.
Once the file is clean, submit it in Search Console and check the coverage report a week later. The gap between “submitted” and “indexed” is the number that tells you whether the problem is discovery or quality — and if it is quality, no amount of sitemap work will move it.
Questions people ask
Does having a sitemap improve rankings?
No. It improves discovery, which is a different thing. A sitemap helps Google find URLs it might otherwise reach slowly or not at all — deep pages, pages with few internal links, a new site with no backlinks. It does not make a found page rank better.
How many URLs can one sitemap hold?
Fifty thousand, or 50 MB uncompressed, whichever comes first. Past that, split into several files and list them in a sitemap index. An index has the same fifty thousand limit for its own entries, and an index may not contain another index.
Should every page be in the sitemap?
Every page you want indexed, and nothing else. Tag archives, paginated series, filtered views and thank-you pages usually should not be there. If you would not be pleased to see it as a search result, it does not belong in the file.
Why are my submitted URLs not indexed?
Submission is a request, not an instruction. Google indexes what it judges worth indexing. Consistently large gaps between submitted and indexed usually mean thin or duplicated pages rather than a sitemap problem, and the sitemap is the wrong place to look for the fix.
Where to go from here
- Robots.txt Checker and URL Tester — Confirm the sitemap is declared and the URLs in it are crawlable.
- Canonical Tag Checker — A sitemap should list canonical URLs only — check that it does.
- SEO Audit Checklist — The full walkthrough this check belongs to.
- The thinking behind the SEO audit checklist — Where sitemaps sit in an audit.
The guide behind this tool
Built by GoDesign FZE, who run technical SEO fixes for UAE sites.
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