XML Sitemap Validator

A sitemap that breaks the protocol can be skipped in part or rejected entirely, and the errors are easy to miss: an unescaped & in a URL, a relative address, a lastmod without a time zone, a priority of 2, or URLs on another host. Paste your sitemap.xml or upload it (plain or .xml.gz) and this validator checks every entry against the sitemaps.org protocol and Google's documented rules, including image, video, news and hreflang extensions. The file stays in your browser; this page does not download sitemaps from other sites.

How to use this tool

1. Paste the sitemap XML, or upload a .xml, .xml.gz or one-URL-per-line text sitemap.
2. Optionally enter the address where the sitemap is published, to check host, protocol and folder.
3. Read the verdict and the counts of errors and warnings.
4. Fix the entries listed in the problem tables, starting with errors, and check again.

Formula

Limits: ≤ 50,000 URLs (or sitemaps in an index) and ≤ 50 MB (52,428,800 bytes) uncompressed per file; each <loc> absolute, entity-escaped and under 2,048 characters.

Errors break the protocol (wrong namespace, missing or relative <loc>, bad lastmod, changefreq or priority values, missing required image, video or news tags). Warnings are allowed by the format but usually mistakes: duplicates, other hosts or protocols, fragments, future dates, news older than two days, hreflang sets that are not reciprocal. Info lines mark tags Google ignores.

Example

An entry with <loc>/page</loc> is an error because the address must be absolute (https://example.com/page). <priority>1.5</priority> and <changefreq>sometimes</changefreq> are errors because the allowed values are 0.0–1.0 and always … never. 2026-01-15T10:00:00 without "Z" or "+00:00" is an error because a W3C time needs a time zone. Listing the same URL twice is a warning.