A sitemap is the list of pages you are handing Google to crawl. One malformed tag or a stray non-https URL and search engines quietly skip the whole file. We validate it against the rules that matter: well-formed XML, urlset versus sitemapindex, the URL count, and the hard limits. From Google's own docs: a sitemap file can't be larger than 50MB (uncompressed) and can contain at most 50,000 URLs. Paste your XML below and it runs entirely in your browser.
free / no email / tries yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
your sitemap is 1 input to the 116 checks in the full auditlamp audit
Open your sitemap in a browser (usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), select all, and paste it below. We parse it in your browser and never send it anywhere. This is the mode that always works, because fetching another site's file across origins is something browsers block by design.
Most broken sitemaps parse fine to the eye but fail on one rule a crawler enforces. Here is what we read, grounded in the sitemaps.org protocol and Google's Build and submit a sitemap guidance.
& that should be & makes the file unparseable, and a crawler drops it whole. We run it through the browser's XML parser and report the first fault by its own message.<urlset>. A sitemap index lists other sitemaps inside a <sitemapindex>. Mixing them, or naming the root wrong, is a common reason a file is ignored. We tell you which one you have and count its entries.<loc> is dead weight. A <loc> on http:// points crawlers at the insecure version of your page. We flag both, plus any URL longer than 2,048 characters, which is over the practical limit.<lastmod> only when it is a valid W3C datetime and consistently accurate. We check the format (for example 2026-07-01 or a full timestamp) and flag dates that are malformed or impossible.One honest thing, straight from Google: it ignores <priority> and <changefreq>. They do nothing for how or when your pages get crawled. If your sitemap leans on them to push a page, that effort is wasted. We note their presence so you know the file is spending characters on signals no engine reads.
No. A sitemap helps search engines discover and crawl your pages, especially on large sites or ones with few internal links, but it is not a ranking factor. Google is explicit that submitting a URL in a sitemap does not guarantee it will be crawled or indexed, and that a page's position is decided by relevance and quality, not by being listed. Think of a sitemap as a map you hand the crawler, not a lever on where you land. The value is coverage: making sure nothing important is missed, not boosting what is already found.
Not for Google. Google's documentation states plainly that it ignores the <priority> and <changefreq> values, so setting every page to priority 1.0 and changefreq daily changes nothing about crawl scheduling. The one date-style tag that can matter is <lastmod>, and only when it is a valid W3C datetime and genuinely reflects the last meaningful change to the page. If your lastmod updates to today on every page every day, Google learns to distrust it and ignores that too. Accurate lastmod, or leave it out.
A single sitemap file can contain at most 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB uncompressed. If your site has more URLs than that, you split them across multiple sitemap files and list those files in a sitemap index, which is itself capped at 50,000 sitemaps and 50MB. Most sites never approach these limits, but a large store or publisher can, and blowing past either one causes the crawler to reject the file rather than truncate it. When in doubt, split early and keep each file well under the ceiling.
A clean sitemap only helps if the pages it lists can actually be crawled, read and cited. The full AuditLamp audit runs 116 documented checks on your live site in one free scan: whether crawlers can reach you, whether your content survives without JavaScript, whether there is an answer worth quoting near the top, and whether your sitemap and robots.txt agree. Full score on screen, no email taken.