How to check a sitemap
- Load your sitemap from its URL, for example
https://example.com/sitemap.xml, or open or paste the file. Gzip-compressed.xml.gzsitemaps are unpacked automatically. - Read the summary and the list of issues. Errors break the protocol, warnings point to likely problems and notes are suggestions – each with its line number.
- Check the URL table with lastmod, changefreq, priority and hreflang, and export it as CSV if needed.
Sitemap rules at a glance
| Rule | Limit or format |
|---|---|
| URLs per sitemap | At most 50,000 <url> entries |
| File size | At most 50 MB (52,428,800 bytes) uncompressed |
| Sitemaps per index | At most 50,000 <sitemap> entries |
| Root element | <urlset> or <sitemapindex> in the namespace http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 |
<loc> | Absolute http or https URL, fewer than 2,048 characters, with & written as & |
| Hosts | All URLs on the same host as the sitemap |
<lastmod> | W3C Datetime, such as 2026-10-29 or 2026-10-29T14:30:00+00:00 |
<changefreq> | always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never |
<priority> | 0.0 to 1.0; the default is 0.5 |
| Encoding | UTF-8 |
Google ignores <changefreq> and <priority> and uses <lastmod> only when it is consistently accurate, so update lastmod only when the content really changes. Larger sites split their URLs into several sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index. All details are in the sitemaps.org protocol.
hreflang in sitemaps
Multilingual sites can list language versions with <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="…"/> inside each <url>, after declaring xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" on the root element. The validator checks the rules that search engines apply:
- A code is a language (ISO 639-1), optionally followed by a region (ISO 3166-1), such as
en,en-GBorpt-BR– orx-default. - Each URL lists every language version, including itself.
- Links are mutual: if page A points to page B, page B must point back to page A.
- Each code appears only once per URL, and an
x-defaultfallback is recommended.
Frequently asked questions
Where do I find my sitemap?
Usually at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml in the root of the site; WordPress creates /wp-sitemap.xml. The robots.txt file often names it in a Sitemap: line.
Does a valid sitemap guarantee indexing?
No. A sitemap helps search engines discover your URLs, but they decide what to crawl and index. Make sure the listed pages return status 200, are canonical and are not blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag – this tool checks the sitemap file, not the pages.
Can I check a sitemap index?
Yes. A sitemap index is recognized automatically, and its child sitemaps are listed with their lastmod dates. They are not fetched one by one, so load each child sitemap's URL to check it as well.
Is my sitemap uploaded?
Files you open or paste are checked in your browser. A sitemap URL is fetched through our server, because most websites do not let browsers read their files directly.